THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 99 



Still domesticated and made the permanent and regular denizens ot" 

 his fields or companions of his household. 



The efforts of civilized man towards the fulfilment of this great com- 

 mand have been directed almost exclusively to the conquest of inor- 

 ganic nature, by the utilization of minerals ; by contriving methods for 

 availing himself of the mechanical powers and of natural threes, simply 

 or in cunning combinations ; by cutting narrow paths for facilitating 

 travel and transport between distant regions; and by devising means of 

 traversing with certainty and speed the trackless and troubled ocean. 



The proper savage smelts no ores, and employs those metals only 

 which natural processes have reduced. He binds the blocks of which 

 he rears his temples with no cement of artificial stone. He drains no 

 swamps, cuts no roads, excavates no canals, turns no mills by power 

 of water or of wind, and asks from inorganic nature no other gifts than 

 those which she spontaneously offers, to supply his wants and multiply 

 his enjoyments. 



On the other hand, the very dawn of social life, in those stages of hu- 

 man existence which quite precede all true civihzation, demands, as an 

 indispensable condition, not the mere usufruct of the spontaneous pro- 

 ductions of organic nature, but the complete appropriation and domes- 

 tication of many species of both plants and animals. Man begins by 

 subjugating, and thereby preserving, those organic forms which are at 

 once best suited to satisfy his natural wants, and, like himself, least 

 fitted for a self-sustaining, independent existence;* and he is to end by 

 extending his conquests over the more widely dissimilar, remote, and 

 refractory products of creative nature. We accordingly owe to our 

 primeval, untutored ancestors, the discovery, the domestication, the 

 acclimation of our cereal grains, our edible roots, our improved fruits, as 

 well as the subjugation of our domestic animals ; while civilized man 

 has scarcely reclaimed a plant of spontaneous growth, or added a newly 

 tamed animal to the flocks and herds of the pastoral ages. Indeed, so 

 remote is the period to which these noble triumphs of intelligent hu- 

 manity over brute and vegetable nature belong, that we know not their 

 history or their epochs ; and if we believe them to be in fact human 

 conquests, and not rather special birth-day gifts from the hand of the 

 Creator, we must admit that cultivation and domestication have so com- 

 pletely metamorphosed and diversified the forms and products, and 

 modified the habits, and even, so to speak, the inborn instincts of both 

 vegetables and animals, that but the fewest of our household beasts and 

 our famihar plants can be certainly identified with the primitive stock. 

 JMost of these, it is probable, no longer occur in their wild state and 

 original form ; and it is questionable u'hether they are even capable of 

 continued existence without the fostering care of man. 



In both these great divisions of organic life there arc some species 



* It is not the domestic animals alone whose existence is perpetuated by the protective, 

 though often unconscious, agency of man. In the depths of our northern forests the voice of 

 the song-bird, or of tiie smaller quadrupeds, is but seldom heard. It is in the fields tilled by 

 human husbandry that they find the most abundant nutriment, and the surest retreat from 

 bird and beast of prey. The vast flights of the wild pigeon are found, not in tlie remote, 

 primitive woodlands, but along the borders of the pioneer settlements ; and, upon our west- 

 ern frontier, it is observed that the deer often multiply for a time after tlic coming in of the 

 whites, because the civilized huntsman destroys or scares away the wolf, the great natural 

 enemy of the weaker quadrupeds. 



