The wanderings of animals / by Hans Gadow.

  • Hans Friedrich Gadow
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The wanderings of animals / by Hans Gadow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    degrees of deserts, unmitigated deserts, periodical deserts shading into rather arid stretches, semi- deserts, and lastly steppes, pampas or prairies which are subject to prolonged drought, periodical or un¬ certain. As a rule bad deserts are surrounded by a belt of half-deserts, and these pass into fair pasture land. The French word prairie, the Russian steppe and the South American pampa practically mean the same, namely grassy plain. We mostly associate with the idea of a desert a boundless extent of sand without any vegetation, but this is not necessarily the case. There are huge deserts, which are stony, or rocky tablelands, or full of chains of mountains, and again there are sandy deserts with even tree-like growth on them, and certainly with grass, which however may be so scanty that one appreciates it only if he lies down upon the ground and then observes the grey-green shim¬ mer. There are, broadly speaking, five such arid com¬ plexes in the world. 1. The largest extends from the coast of North- West Africa through the Sahara and thence with many interruptions through Arabia and Persia into North-West India; the neighbourhood of Lakes Caspi and Aral, Turkestan, great portions of Tibet and of Mongolia, there as the so-called Gobi or Shamo, i.e. sea of sand.
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