occasional hard usage and frequent neglect. If the animal had no
natural attachment to our species, it would fret itself to death, or
escape and revert to wildness. It is easy to find cases where the
partial or total non-fulfilment of this condition is a corresponding
obstacle to domestication. Some kinds of cattle are too precious to
be discarded, but very troublesome to look after. Such are the
reindeer to the Lapps. Mr. Campbell of Islay informed me that the
tamest of certain herds of them look as if they were wild; they have
to be caught with a lasso to be milked. If they take fright, they
are off to the hills; consequently the Lapps are forced to
accommodate themselves to the habits of their beasts, and to follow
them from snow to sea and from sea to snow at different seasons. The
North American reindeer has never been domesticated, owing, I presume,
to this cause. The Peruvian herdsmen would have had great trouble to
endure had the llama and alpaca not existed, for their cogeners, the
huanacu and the vicuna, are hardly to be domesticated.
Zebras, speaking broadly, are unmanageable. The Dutch Boers
constantly endeavour to break them to harness, and though they
occasionally succeed to a degree, the wild mulish nature of the
animal is always breaking out, and liable to balk them.
It is certain that some animals have naturally a greater fondness
for man than others; and as a proof of this, I will again quote
Hearne about the moose, who are considered by him to be the easiest
to tame and domesticate of any of the deer tribe. Formerly the
closely-allied European elks were domesticated in Sweden, and used
to draw sledges, as they are now occasionally in Canada; but they
have been obsolete for many years. Hearne says:--
"The young ones are so simple that I remember to have seen an Indian
paddle his canoe up to one of them, and take it by the poll, without
experiencing the least opposition, the poor harmless animal seeming
at the same time as contented alongside the canoe as if swimming by
the side of its dam, and looking up in our faces with the same
fearless innocence that a house lamb would."
On the other hand, a young bison will try to dash out its brains
against the tree to which it is tied, in terror and hatred of its
captors.
It is interesting to note the causes that conduce to a decided
attachment of certain animals to man, or between one kind of animal
and another. It is notorious that attachments and aversions exist in
nature. Swallows, rooks, and storks frequent dwelling houses;
ostriches and zebras herd together; so do bisons and elks. On the
other hand, deer and sheep, which are both gregarious, and both eat
the same food and graze within the same enclosure, avoid one another.
The spotted Danish dog, the Spitz dog, and the cat, have all a
strong attachment to horses, and horses seem pleased with their
company; but dogs and cats are proverbially discordant. I presume
that two species of animals do not consider one another companionable,
or clubable, unless their behaviour and their persons are
reciprocally agreeable. A phlegmatic animal would be exceedingly
disquieted by the close companionship of an excitable one. The
movements of one beast may have a character that is unpleasing to
the eyes of another; his cries may sound discordant; his smell may
be repulsive. Two herds of animals would hardly intermingle, unless
their respective languages of action and of voice were mutually
intelligible. The animal which above all others is a companion to
man is the dog, and we observe how readily their proceedings are
intelligible to each other. Every whine or bark of the dog, each of
his fawning, savage, or timorous movements is the exact counterpart
of what would have been the man's behaviour, had he felt similar
emotions. As the man understands the thoughts of the dog, so the dog
understands the thoughts of the man, by attending to his natural
voice, his countenance, and his actions. A man irritates a dog by an
ordinary laugh, he frightens him by an angry look, or he calms him
by a kindly bearing; but he has less spontaneous hold over an ox or a
sheep. He must study their ways and tutor his behaviour before he
can either understand the feelings of those animals or make his own
intelligible to them. He has no natural power at all over many other
creatures. Who, for instance, ever succeeded in frowning away a
mosquito, or in pacifying an angry wasp by a smile?
_Desire of Comfort_.--This is a motive which strongly attaches
certain animals to human habitations, even though they are unwelcome:
it is a motive which few persons who have not had an opportunity of
studying animals in savage lands are likely to estimate at its true
value. The life of all beasts in their wild state is an exceedingly
anxious one. From my own recollection, I believe that every antelope
in South Africa has to run for its life every one or two days upon
an average, and that he starts or gallops under the influence of a
false alarm many times in a day. Those who have crouched at night by
the side of pools in the desert, in order to have a shot at the
beasts that frequent them, see strange scenes of animal life; how
the creatures gambol at one moment and fight at another; how a herd
suddenly halts in strained attention, and then breaks into a
maddened rush, as one of them becomes conscious of the stealthy
movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly
life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures,
but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament
of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits
and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which
has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors,
either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed
indignantly into the forest with his ribs aching from blows and
stones. If a comfort-loving animal, he will probably be no gainer by
the change, more serious alarms and no less ill-usage awaits him; he
hears the roar of the wild beasts and the headlong gallop of the
frightened herds, and he finds the buttings and the kicks of other
animals harder to endure than the blows from which he fled. He has
the disadvantage of being a stranger, for the herds of his own
species which he seeks for companionship constitute so many cliques,
into which he can only find admission by more fighting with their
strongest members than he has spirit to undergo. As a set-off
against these miseries, the freedom of savage life has no charms for
his temperament; so the end of it is, that with a heavy heart he
turns back to the habitation he had quitted. When animals thoroughly
enjoy the excitement of wild life, I presume they cannot be
domesticated, they could only be tamed, for they would never return
from the joys of the wilderness after they had once tasted them
through some accidental wandering.
Gallinas, or guinea-fowl, have so little care for comfort, or indeed
for man, that they fall but a short way within the frontier of
domestication. It is only in inclement seasons that they take
contentedly to the poultry-yards.
Elephants, from their size and power, are not dependent on man for
protection; hence, those that have been reared as pets from the time
they were calves, and have never learned to dread and obey the
orders of a driver, are peculiarly apt to revert to wildness if they
once are allowed to wander and escape to the woods. I believe this
tendency, together with the cost of maintenance and the comparative
uselessness of the beasts, are among the chief causes why Africans
never tame them now; though they have not wholly lost the practice
of capturing them when full-grown, and of keeping them imprisoned
for some days alive. Mr. Winwood Reade's account of captured
elephants, seen by himself near Glass Town in Equatorial Western
Africa, is very curious.
_Usefulness to Man_.--To proceed with the list of requirements
which a captured animal must satisfy before it is possible he could
be permanently domesticated: there is the very obvious condition
that he should be useful to man; otherwise, in growing to maturity,
and losing the pleasing youthful ways which had first attracted his
captors and caused them to make a pet of him, he would be repelled.
As an instance in point, I will mention seals. Many years ago I used
to visit Shetland, when those animals were still common, and I heard
many stories of their being tamed: one will suffice:--A fisherman
caught a young seal; it was very affectionate, and frequented his hut,
fishing for itself in the sea. At length it grew self-willed and
unwieldy; it used to push the children and snap at strangers, and it
was voted a nuisance, but the people could not bear to kill it on
account of its human ways. One day the fisherman took it with him in
his boat, and dropped it in a stormy sea, far from home; the
stratagem was unsuccessful; in a day or two the well-known scuffling
sound of the seal, as it floundered up to the hut, was again heard;
the animal had found its way home. Some days after the poor creature
was shot by a sporting stranger, who saw it basking and did not know
it was tame. Now had the seal been a useful animal and not
troublesome, the fisherman would doubtless have caught others, and
set a watch over them to protect them; and then, if they bred freely
and were easy to tend, it is likely enough he would have produced a
domestic breed.
The utility of the animals as a store of future food is undoubtedly
the most durable reason for maintaining them; but I think it was
probably not so early a motive as the chief's pleasure in possessing
them. That was the feeling under which the menageries, described
above, were established. Whatever the despot of savage tribes is
pleased with becomes invested with a sort of sacredness. His tame
animals would be the care of all his people, who would become
skilful herdsmen under the pressure of fear. It would be as much as
their lives were worth if one of the creatures were injured through
their neglect. I believe that the keeping of a herd of beasts, with
the sole motive of using them as a reserve for food, or as a means
of barter, is a late idea in the history of civilisation. It has now
become established among the pastoral races of South Africa, owing
to the traffickings of the cattle-traders, but it was by no means
prevalent in Damara-Land when I travelled there in 1852. I then was
surprised to observe the considerations that induced the chiefs to
take pleasure in their vast herds of cattle. They were valued for
their stateliness and colour, far more than for their beef. They
were as the deer of an English squire, or as the stud of a man who
has many more horses than he can ride. An ox was almost a sacred
beast in Damara-Land, not to be killed except on momentous occasions,
and then as a sort of sacrificial feast, in which all bystanders
shared. The payment of two oxen was hush-money for the life of a man.
I was considerably embarrassed by finding that I had the greatest
trouble in buying oxen for my own use, with the ordinary articles of
barter. The possessor would hardly part with them for any
remuneration; they would never sell their handsomest beasts.
One of the ways in which the value of tamed beasts would be soon
appreciated would be that of giving milk to children. It is
marvellous how soon goats find out children and tempt them to suckle.
I have had the milk of my goats, when encamping for the night in
African travels, drained dry by small black children, who had not
the strength to do more than crawl about, but nevertheless came to
some secret understanding with the goats and fed themselves. The
records of many nations have legends like that of Romulus and Remus,
who are stated to have been suckled by wild beasts. These are
surprisingly confirmed by General Sleeman's narrative of six cases
where children were nurtured for many years by wolves in Oude.
(_Journey through Oude in 1849-50_, i. 206.)
_Breeding freely_.--Domestic animals must breed freely under
confinement. This necessity limits very narrowly the number of
species which might otherwise have been domesticated. It is one of
the most important of all the conditions that have to be satisfied.
The North American turkey, reared from the eggs of the wild bird, is
stated to be unknown in the third generation, in captivity. Our
turkey comes from Mexico, and was abundantly domesticated by the
ancient Mexicans.
The Indians of the Upper Amazon took turtle and placed them in
lagoons for use in seasons of scarcity. The Spaniards who first saw
them called these turtle "Indian cattle." They would certainly have
become domesticated like cattle, if they had been able to breed in
captivity.
_Easy to tend_.--They must be tended easily. When animals reared
in the house are suffered to run about in the companionship of
others like themselves, they naturally revert to much of their
original wildness. It is therefore essential to domestication that
they should possess some quality by which large numbers of them may
be controlled by a few herdsmen. The instinct of gregariousness is
such a quality. The herdsman of a vast troop of oxen grazing in a
forest, so long as he is able to see one of them, knows pretty
surely that they are all within reach. If oxen are frightened and
gallop off, they do not scatter, but remain in a single body. When
animals are not gregarious, they are to the herdsman like a falling
necklace of beads whose string is broken, or as a handful of water
escaping between the fingers.
The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is retained
by its extraordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which
it is reared.
An animal may be perfectly fitted to be a domestic animal, and be
peculiarly easy to tend in a general way, and yet the circumstances
in which the savages are living may make it too troublesome for them
to maintain a breed. The following account, taken from Mr. Scott
Nind's paper on the Natives of King George's Sound in Australia, and
printed in the first volume of the _Journal of the Geographical
Society_, is particularly to the point. He says:--
"In the chase the hunters are assisted by dogs, which they take when
young and domesticate; but they take little pains to train them to
any particular mode of hunting. After finding a litter of young, the
natives generally carry away one or two to rear; in this case, it
often occurs that the mother will trace and attack them; and, being
large and very strong, she is rather formidable. At some periods,
food is so scanty as to compel the dog to leave his master and
provide for himself; but in a few days he generally returns."
I have also evidence that this custom is common to the wild natives
of other parts of Australia.
The gregariousness of all our domestic species is, I think, the
primary reason why some of them are extinct in a wild state. The
wild herds would intermingle with the tame ones, some would become
absorbed, the others would be killed by hunters, who used the tame
cattle as a shelter to approach the wild. Besides this,
comfort-loving animals would be less suited to fight the battle of
life with the rest of the brute creation; and it is therefore to be
expected that those varieties which are best fitted for domestication,
would be the soonest extinguished in a wild state. For instance, we
could hardly fancy the camel to endure in a land where there were
large wild beasts.
_Selection_.--The irreclaimably wild members of every flock would
escape and be utterly lost; the wilder of those that remained would
assuredly be selected for slaughter, when ever it was necessary that
one of the flock should be killed. The tamest cattle--those that
seldom ran away, that kept the flock together and led them
homewards--would be preserved alive longer than any of the others.
It is therefore these that chiefly become the parents of stock, and
bequeath their domestic aptitudes to the future herd. I have
constantly witnessed this process of selection among the pastoral
savages of South Africa. I believe it to be a very important one, on
account of its rigour and its regularity. It must have existed from
the earliest times, and have been in continuous operation,
generation after generation, down to the present day.
_Exceptions_.--I have already mentioned the African elephant, the
North American reindeer, and the apparent, but not real exception of
the North American turkey. I should add the ducks and geese of North
America, but I cannot consider them in the light of a very strong
case, for a savage who constantly changes his home is not likely to
carry aquatic birds along with him. Beyond these few, I know of no
notable exceptions to my theory.
_Summary_.
I see no reason to suppose that the first domestication of any animal,
except the elephant, implies a high civilisation among the people
who established it. I cannot believe it to have been the result of a
preconceived intention, followed by elaborate trials, to administer
to the comfort of man. Neither can I think it arose from one
successful effort made by an individual, who might thereby justly
claim the title of benefactor to his race; but, on the contrary,
that a vast number of half-unconscious attempts have been made
throughout the course of ages, and that ultimately, by slow degrees,
after many relapses, and continued selection, our several domestic
breeds became firmly established.
I will briefly restate what appear to be the conditions under which
wild animals may become domesticated:--1, they should be hardy; 2,
they should have an inborn liking for man; 3, they should be
comfort-loving; 4, they should be found useful to the savages; 5,
they should breed freely; 6, they should be easy to tend. It would
appear that every wild animal has had its chance of being
domesticated, that those few which fulfilled the above conditions
were domesticated long ago, but that the large remainder, who fail
sometimes in only one small particular, are destined to perpetual
wildness so long as their race continues. As civilisation extends
they are doomed to be gradually destroyed off the face of the earth
as useless consumers of cultivated produce. I infer that slight
differences in natural dispositions of human races may in one case
lead irresistibly to some particular career, and in another case may
make that career an impossibility.
THE OBSERVED ORDER OF EVENTS.
There is nothing as yet observed in the order of events to make us
doubt that the universe is bound together in space and time, as a
single entity, and there is a concurrence of many observed facts to
induce us to accept that view. We may, therefore, not unreasonably
profess faith in a common and mysterious whole, and of the laborious
advance, under many restrictions, of that infinitely small part of
it which falls under our observation, but which is in itself
enormously large, and behind which lies the awful mystery of the
origin of all existence.
The conditions that direct the order of the whole of the living
world around us, are marked by their persistence in improving the
birthright of successive generations. They determine, at much cost
of individual comfort, that each plant and animal shall, on the
general average, be endowed at its birth with more suitable natural
faculties than those of its representative in the preceding
generation. They ensure, in short, that the inborn qualities of the
terrestrial tenantry shall become steadily better adapted to their
homes and to their mutual needs. This effect, be it understood, is
not only favourable to the animals who live long enough to become
parents, but is also favourable to those who perish in earlier life,
because even they are on the whole better off during their brief
career than if they had been born still less adapted to the
conditions of their existence. If we summon before our imagination
in a single mighty host, the whole number of living things from the
earliest date at which terrestrial life can be deemed to have
probably existed, to the latest future at which we may think it can
probably continue, and if we cease to dwell on the miscarriages of
individual lives or of single generations, we shall plainly perceive
that the actual tenantry of the world progresses in a direction that
may in some sense be described as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.
We also remark that while the motives by which individuals in the
lowest stages are influenced are purely self regarding, they broaden
as evolution goes on. The word "self" ceases to be wholly personal,
and begins to include subjects of affection and interest, and these
become increasingly numerous as intelligence and depth of character
develop, and as civilisation extends. The sacrifice of the personal
desire for repose to the performance of domestic and social duties
is an everyday event with us, and other sacrifices of the smaller to
the larger self are by no means uncommon. Life in general may be
looked upon as a republic where the individuals are for the most
part unconscious that while they are working for themselves they are
also working for the public good.
We may freely confess ignorance of the outcome in the far future of
that personal life to which we each cling passionately in the joyous
morning of the affections, but which, as these and other interests
fail, does not seem so eminently desirable in itself. We know that
organic life can hardly be expected to flourish on this earth of
ours for so long a time as it has already existed, because the sun
will in all probability have lost too much of its heat and light by
then, and will have begun to grow dark and therefore cold, as other
stars have done. The conditions of existence here, which are now
apparently in their prime, will have become rigorous and
increasingly so, and there will be retrogression towards lower types,
until the simplest form of life shall have wholly disappeared from
the ice-bound surface. The whole living world will then have waxed
and waned like an individual life.
Neither can we discover whether organisms here are capable of
attaining the average development of organisms in other of the
planets that are probably circling round most of the myriads of stars,
whose physical constitution, where-ever it has as yet been observed
spectroscopically, does not differ much from that of our sun. But we
perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and germs; we
find out of any group of a thousand men selected at random, some who
are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise born incurably
imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may
rank among other worlds as one of these.
We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious
selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of
which the body of each of us is composed. We only know that the
cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and
others growing to supply their places, and that the continual
sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the
larger and conscious life of the man as a whole. Our part in the
universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of
the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the
transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind.
Our views of the object of life have to be framed so as not to be
inconsistent with the observed facts from which these various
possibilities are inferred; it is safer that they should not exclude
the possibilities themselves. We must look on the slow progress of
the order of evolution, and the system of routine by which it has
thus far advanced, as due to antecedents and to inherent conditions
of which we have not as yet the slightest conception. It is
difficult to withstand a suspicion that the three dimensions of
space and the fourth dimension of time may be four independent
variables of a system that is neither space nor time, but something
else wholly unconceived by us. Our present enigma as to how a First
Cause could itself have been brought into existence--how the
tortoise of the fable, that bears the elephant that bears the world,
is itself supported,--may be wholly due to our necessary
mistranslation of the four or more variables of the universe,
limited by inherent conditions, into the three unlimited variables
of Space and the one of Time.