Chapter XXV.

1. The camel is pregnant ten months, and always produces a single young one, for this is its nature. They separate the young camel from the herd at a year old. The camel will live more than fifty years. The season of parturition is in the spring, and the female continues to give milk until she conceives again. Their flesh and milk are exceedingly sweet. The milk is drunk mixed with two or three times its quantity of water.

2. Elephants begin to copulate at twenty years old. When the female is impregnated, her period of gestation, some persons say, is a year and a half; other people make it three years. The difficulty of seeing their copulation causes this difference of opinion respecting the period of gestation. The female produces her young bending upon her haunches. Her pain is evident. The calf, when it is born, sucks with its mouth, and not with its proboscis. It can walk and see as soon as it is born.

3. Wild swine copulate at the beginning of winter. They produce their young in the spring. For this purpose the female gets away into inaccessible and precipitous places, where there are caves and plenty of shade. The males remain with the females for thirty days. The number of pigs and the period of gestation are the same as in the domesticated herd, and their voices are much alike: the female, however, grunts more and the male less. The castration of the male makes them larger and more fierce, as Homer writes. "He brought up a castrated wild boar, which was not like a beast fed upon food, but resembled a woody mountain peak." Castration takes place from a disease like a swelling in the testicles, which they rub against the trees and so destroy them.