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Updated: September 15, 2025
Although long a captive, and for ages, perhaps, the most serviceable of all the creatures which man has won from the wilds, the camel is still only partly domesticated, having never acquired even the small measure of affection for his master which we find in the other herbivorous animals which have been won to the service of man.
Of the cactus family, the most conspicuous is the saguaro, or giant cactus, which frequently attains the height of fifty feet. All the cacti are leafless and abundantly supplied with sharp, needle-like spines which protect them from herbivorous animals. The bark or outer covering has a firm, close texture that prevents the sap from evaporating during the long, dry season.
On these unobstructed stretches grasses grew in profusion; and here roamed great herds of herbivorous animal-kind deer and elk, and also buffalo, "filing in grave procession to drink at the rivers, plunging and snorting among the rapids and quicksands, rolling their huge bulk on the grass, rushing upon each other in hot encounter, like champions under shield."
These two species of Amblyrhynchus agree, as I have already stated, in their general structure, and in many of their habits. Neither have that rapid movement, so characteristic of the genera Lacerta and Iguana. They are both herbivorous, although the kind of vegetation on which they feed is so very different. Mr.
But it may also be presumed that when a hunter population, always scanty in numbers, ranged over this region, they were too wary to allow themselves to be overtaken by the floods which swept away many herbivorous animals from the low river-plains where they may have been pasturing or sleeping.
They had hoofs, single hoofs, not cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin and fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous.
Fortune favored her that night, for she passed unscathed through as savage and lion-ridden an area as there is in all Africa a natural hunting ground which the white man has not yet discovered, where deer and antelope and zebra, giraffe and elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, and the other herbivorous animals of central Africa abound unmolested by none but their natural enemies, the great cats which, lured here by easy prey and immunity from the rifles of big-game hunters, swarm the district.
Observe the way in which an herbivorous or graminivorous animal becomes excited and angry when the branch or the ear of corn obstinately adheres to the ground, or offers any other difficulty to his immediate desire of obtaining food; he acts like one who has to do with a resisting power.
A woman well informed in such matters can read her future in a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say from the fragment of a bone: This belonged to an animal of such or such dimensions, with or without horns, carnivorous, herbivorous, amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand years.
Caverns were the haunts of hyenas, tigers, bears, and other beasts of prey, which dragged into them the bodies of their victims, and left many of their bones to become embedded in stalagmite or in the muddy deposit left by floods, while herbivorous animals were often carried into them by these floods, or by falling down the swallow-holes which often open into caverns from above.
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