FROM SAVAGE TO CIVILIZED LIFE. 189 



mode of procuring his food. Like other predaceous animals, the structure of whose 

 members are all in strict conformity with their destined mode of life, man must 

 have had fangs to tear, and claws to seize, his living prey, if such were to have been 

 the principal or sole means of procuring his food. Besides, the hunter's state, as 

 practised by tribes of savages known to Europeans, presupposes knowledge of va- 

 rious kinds to a considerable extent, both in regard to the habits of the animals 

 and the implements of the chase. And it does not appear by what process of re- 

 flection or experiment, savages, ignorant of the use of dressed food, or of fire to 

 dress it, could have acquired the knowledge of this necessary of life. M. BORY 

 DE Sx VINCENT may talk of the electric fluid kindling into flame the dry woods, or 

 craters of volcanoes throwing out red-hot embers, and raising into temporary fires 

 the surrounding vegetation ; but savages, to whom fire and its uses were unknown, 

 could not, even from these appearances, have learned its use in dressing food or 

 producing heat. A philosopher of the present day, with all the knowledge and 

 appliances of modern science, might, from the accidental burning of a forest or the 

 vegetation kindled by a volcano, form some idea of the uses of an agent such as 

 this, both in regard to the preparation of food and the production of heat ; but to 

 suppose an ignorant savage, without even the knowledge that food required dress- 

 ing, or that there was any heat independent of the sun's rays, to suppose such 

 a being to discover that, from the friction of two pieces of wood, or by striking a 

 flint on a piece of iron, he could produce living flames, is to take for granted the 

 most improbable of all propositions. 



But, granting for one moment that wild fruits produced spontaneously, and the 

 animals supplied by hunting, formed the food of the earliest races, the question 

 must recur, How did these hunters acquire the knowledge that the animals they 

 pursued in the field or forest could be tamed and reared beside their huts ? It 

 appears far more probable, that the animals least capable of escaping the arts 

 of the hunter would have been extirpated by the increasing population, unless 

 they had existed in untold numbers, and over territories beyond the range of the 

 hunting-ground.* And even from the taming of a single fawn or kid, procured 

 alive by accident, as Lord KAMES supposes to have been the case, it could scarcely 

 be inferred that the whole race, and other races of independent animals, could be 

 made to contribute to the increasing wants of man. The savages of North 

 America have not tamed the bison of their prairies nor the tapir of their marshes; 

 and indeed there is no recorded and authentic instance of hunting-savages tam- 

 ing wild animals and subjecting them to their use, or rising by their own efforts 

 from the hunting to the pastoral state. 



Besides, it is a well ascertained fact, that all herbivorous animals have an 

 instinctive dread of their natural enemies, the predaceous races, and fly at their 

 approach. And to this instinctive distrust, which makes the deer or the antelope 



* RAYXAL'S Hist, of East and West Indies, Book xviii. 

 VOL. XV. PART I. 3 E 



