Camel or Dromedary?

“I remember I had a long discourse about the difference between the camel and the dromedary. Buffon gives the camel two humps, and the dromedary one; and this, I believe is the received opinion, as it had always been mine; but, since I had been in the East, I had remarked that it was exceedingly rare to meet a camel with two humps. I had seen together at one time, on the starting of the caravan of pilgrims to Mecca, perhaps twenty thousand camels and dromedaries, and had not seen among them more than half a dozen with two humps. Not satisified with any explanation from European residents or travelers, I had inquired among the Bedouins; and Toualeb, my old guide, brought up among camels, had given such a strange account that I never paid any regard to it. Now, however, the sheik told me the same thing, namely, that they were of different races, the dromedary being to the camel as the blood-horse is to the cart-horse; and that the two humps were peculiar neither to the dromedary nor the camel, or natural to either; but that both are always born with only one hump, which, being a mere mass of flesh, and very tender, almost as soon as the young camel is born a piece is sometimes cut out of the middle for the covenience of better arranging the saddle; and, being cut out of the center, a hump is left on either side of the cavity; and this, according to the account given by Toualeb, is the only way in which two humps ever appear on the back of a camel or dromedary. I should not mention this story if I had heard it only once; but, precisely as I had it from Toualeb, it was confirmed with a great deal of circumstantial detail by another Bedouin, who, like himself, had lived among camels and dromedaries all his life; and his statement was assented to by all his companions. I do not vie this out as a discovery made at this late day in regard to an animal so well known as the camel; indeed, I am told that the Arabs are not ignorant of that elegance of civilized life called ‘quizzing.’ I give it merely to show how I wiled away my time in the desert, and for what it is worth.”

From Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land
by John Lloyd Stephens, 1837.