Animals of to-day, their life and conversation / by C.J. Cornish ; with sixteen illustrations.

  • Cornish, C. J. (Charles John), 1858-1906.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animals of to-day, their life and conversation / by C.J. Cornish ; with sixteen illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    antediluvian animals, without the affections or sensi- bilities of flesh and blood—these only lifted their speaking eyes to the Eastern heavens, and had to all appearance come out of this long tempest of trial unscathed and hardly diminished/ These ‘ innumerable camels * were all of the Bactrian breed, and evidence of the extremes of cold and heat endured in this enterprise of the Kalmucks may be found in the fact that, during the early stages of the flight, circles of men, women and children were found frozen stiff round the camp-fires in the morning, while in the last stage the horde passed for ten days through a waterless desert with only an eight-days’ supply, and yet arrived ‘ without sensible loss ’ of these creatures on the shore of the Chinese lake. The constant references to the Bactrian camels made by De Quincey, and his careful repetition of their distinctive name, show his appreciation of the part they played. But in the end he is still under the dominion of the accepted opinion about camels in general. They are ‘ arid and adust ’—creatures of the sand and the hot desert, rather than of the mountain and the cold desert or steppe, and the South Siberian snows. It is this distinction of habit and habitat which gives novelty to Mr. Hagenbeck’s suggestion. The physical barrier of the Himalayas and the Hindoo-Khoosh not only separates the two species with a completeness not seen