Now these “ruminant” animals, with complicated stomachs and the power of feeding at long intervals, have spread far and wide over the earth under many different forms, and while some are still very numerous, others are now rare, or almost destroyed.

Take, for example, the Camel, the true “child of the desert.” There are no wild camels left now, so long has man conquered and tamed this useful beast of burden. But in past ages vast numbers of camel-like forms lived in North America, which found their way on the one hand to the south, where the Llamas, Alpacas, and Guanacos now feed on the mountains of Peru and Chili, while on the other they travelled over Northern Asia to the deserts of Africa and Arabia, and there became those curious desert-animals which the Arabs used and still use as their beasts of burden. A strange old fellow is the camel, with his two-toed hairy feet, with only nail-hoofs upon them, and his hard pads on his thighs and legs, on which he rests when he lies or kneels. His curious fleshy hump, which is single in the true camel or dromedary and double in the Bactrian camel, serves him as a special provision of fat, and it dwindles when he is short of food, recovering its size and firmness when he is full-fed again; and he is the only cud-chewing animal which has kept his front teeth and defends himself with them, having no horns.

Fig. 69.

The true Camel (Camelus Dromedarius).

Still more strange in some ways are the giraffes,[169] of which we know very little, except that large forms like them once wandered in Europe.[170] For they, with only the same number of bones as other animals, have these so lengthened out that, as they wander in the tropical forests, their slender legs raise them above all other animals, and their long neck, which nevertheless has only seven joints like all the milk-givers, enables them to reach the high trees, so as to strip off the leaves with their ribbon-like tongues.

But we should want much space to discuss such curious forms as these, and we need not go further than the ordinary deer of our parks to read a strange history of how life has gradually armed her children. The giraffe with his long neck to feed, and his wide straggling legs to fly swiftly from danger, has only short hairy covered knobs on his forehead for horns. But the stag, who is obliged to fight, especially when he wishes to secure his wives, has antlers so branched and so heavy that it is a wonder that his neck can carry them.

Now it is in the autumn that the stags fight and struggle together to secure the leadership of the does, and it is then that their antlers are finest and strongest, and they remain so during the whole winter. But when the early spring comes, the bone of the antlers dries up near the head, where there is a little ridge round it, and soon they fall off, a skin forms over the place, and new ones begin to grow. Then as the little knobs push forward and increase, how lovely they are, for the skin covered with soft hair is all over them, carrying the network

Footnote 169. Cameleopardalis.

Footnote 170. See heading of chapter.

of blood-vessels which secrete the bone within. So fast do they grow that antlers weighing seventy-two pounds will be complete in ten weeks, and when they are finished, the “velvet,” as this soft skin is called, dries up, and they rip it off against a tree, leaving the bare bone.

Fig. 70.

The Red-deer with branching antlers.[171]—(After Ridinger).

Thus equipped, the stag is a match for the world, and he knows it; his bearing is proud and haughty, and instead of flying from danger he will turn round and fight fiercely when attacked. And now comes the curious part of his history. In the different stags

Footnote 171. Compare this with the Deer with the one-spiked antler in the picture heading.

of the world we see all kinds of antlers, from one single spike like a stiletto in some American stags, to the superb antlers of the Red-deer, some of which have as many as sixty-six spikes. But when the red-deer begins to grow his antlers, he does not get this splendid tree in the first year, he has only a single spike; this falls off, and the next year he grows them with a second branch; the third year both branches become doubled and another appears, and so each year as he grows them afresh they are more and more complicated, till at last the whole branched tree grows up in a few months. Now in thus increasing his spikes year by year, he is in his own person most curiously retracing the steps of his ancestors in ages past; for, as we have seen, the first deerlike animals had no horns, then as the ages passed on we find that they had single spikes; later on, their descendants grew antlers of two branches, and later still more complicated ones, so that the race put on little by little those magnificent antlers which now the red-deer and others carry, and meanwhile the various species spread all over the world, except into Australia and Africa, south of the desert.

Still, even the stags have times in the year, before their antlers are grown, when they are comparatively defenceless. There remains yet another branch of the “ruminant” family, even better provided with weapons. These are the antelopes, wild cattle, and buffaloes, for with them the horns never fall off. The reason of this is that they grow in quite a different manner from the stags’ antlers. Instead of the bone being laid down by the skin, it grows out as a core from the forehead, and the skin over it hardens into horn as it grows, so that the tip of a bull’s horns is the oldest part.

Fig. 71.

A Buffalo cow defending her calf.—(Livingstone.)

Here then we can have no branching as in the stag, but on the other hand a firm and terrible weapon increasing from year to year; and even the king of the beasts, the lion, when he attacks a large buffalo, is often seriously wounded for his pains. We should not wonder then if these animals had conquered the world wherever man had not destroyed them; but strange to say, they have kept chiefly to the old world, for none have travelled to South America, and only the Bisons have overrun North America with their vast herds. All the rest, buffaloes, wild cattle, antelopes, gazelles, goats and sheep, have made their home in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

and a fine time they must have had of it when all Europe was one field of undulating plains and dense forests, and the ancestors of our cattle crashed through the tangled bushes, drank by the silent rivers, or grazed on the wild rough herbage. Then, where town and villages now stand, there must have been scenes such as travellers still relate of Central Africa, where amid dense jungle, magnificent forests, and flat marshy grounds,

“... the elephant browses at peace in his wood,

And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,

And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will,

In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.”

There the huge buffaloes come down in troops out of the forest to drink, while the great hippopotamuses leave their watery bed to feed on the rough grass of the swamps. Not far off, a herd of zebras comes galloping by to drink lower down in the river, startling the large antelopes feeding quietly in the soft green pasture above, for they know that this is the hour when the lions are abroad and will fall upon any straggler with tooth and nail, while the distant howling of the hyænas shows that they would not be far behind in seizing upon any weak or wounded animal. But little does the heavy rhinoceros care for all this as he too tramps slowly along on his way to drink, for with his size and defences he runs but little risk of attack. Thus all the country is alive with large milk-givers, and we realise that when they ruled all over the world, as they still do in Africa, they too must have had their time of triumph and greatness like the great fish or the monster reptiles.

But hush! as we watch this scene a heavy thud, thud, strikes upon our ear, like the tramping of heavy troops upon soft ground. It is the “lords of the forest,” the large Elephants, which, after feeding all day in the shady jungle, are coming down to drink and bathe. What, then, is the history of these huge antiquated animals that they have not come into our story as yet? The reason is this: as they stand alone now with their huge flapping ears, their column-like legs and feet, and their long grasping trunk, so they have stood apart from the hoofed animals almost as long as we have any knowledge of them. So far as we can judge by their skeleton, especially the shoulder blade, they come nearer to the gnawers, or rodents, than to any of the large vegetable-feeders. Their legs are awkward and their gait clumsy, for the thigh bones are enormously long and thick, and the toes are enclosed in a thick pad with only the nails to mark them; but above all it is the head and mouth which make so strange a figure. Look at the huge forehead, showing a skull of immense size. This skull would be far too heavy to carry if it were not full of hollows, making a large framework to bear the tusks of smooth white ivory, which grow out from the upper jaw to a length of more than six feet on each side,[172] and weigh sometimes from eighty to one hundred pounds. Surely a wonderful size for teeth, and we shall not wonder that they are the only front teeth that the elephant has, and that they go on growing all his life from a permanent pulp, like the gnawing teeth of the rodents. But if he

Footnote 172. In the African elephant; in the Indian they are smaller, and the female has none.

opens his mouth you will see that, besides these, he has at the back huge flat grinders, one, or never more than two, at a time on each side; but those are monsters, with hard enamelled ridges for grinding his food. During his lifetime of about a hundred years the elephant grows six of these teeth on each side, twenty-four in all, the new ones growing up at the back and pushing forward as the old ones wear away.

Fig. 72.

The Indian Elephant.

And, last of all, look at his wonderful trunk; see how it grows out straight from his face, his cheeks merging into it so that he is all nose; and then consider that this trunk, a double-barrelled tube, ending

in a fleshy finger opposite to a thick cushion which acts as a thumb, is the elephant’s arm and hand, with which he feels and grasps and tests everything that comes in his way. With it he can pick up a crumb or root up a strong tree, gather a leaf or tear off a branch, draw up a gallon of water to squirt over his body when heated with the sun, or suck up the few drops in a puddle when water is scarce; with it he caresses those he loves, as gently as a mother strokes her child with her hand, or uses it to dash his enemy upon the ground, before he pierces him with his tusks or tramples him under foot.

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