DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 39 
tive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and 
unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverish- 
ment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the 
soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of 
preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has been 
wantonly wasted. The wandering savage grows no cultivated 
yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable 
life, sympathies which are much more feebly felt by civilized men. The 
popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of 
nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to 
explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and 
the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers, and trees, is one 
of the earliest forms of literary composition. 
In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though 
persecuted as a destroyer of other animals more useful to man, or hunted for 
food, is regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. Some 
ef the North American aboriginal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the 
manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear hunt; and the 
Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes to 
the same animal *‘ ¢? Mands Styrke og tolv Mends Vid,” ten men’s strength 
and twelve men’s cunning, but they still pay to him something of the rever- 
ence with which ancient superstition invested him. ‘The student of Icelandic 
literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi hinn rami a curious illustration of 
this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an 
Icelandic champion-—-dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric words on 
that of Finnbogi—followed by a duel, in which the latter, who had thrown 
away his arms and armor in order that the combatants might meet on equal 
terms, was victorious. See also Friis, Lappisk Mythologi, Christiania, 1871, 
§ 37, and the earlier authors there cited. Drummond Hay’s very interesting 
work on Morocco contains many amusing notices of a similar feeling enter- 
tained by the Moors towards the redoubtable enemy of their flocks—the lion. 
This sympathy helps us to understand how itis that most if not all the 
domestic animals—if indeed they ever existed in a wild state—were appro- 
priated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into organized 
and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant had acquired 
substantially its present artificial character, and that the properties of nearly 
all vegetable drugs and poisons were known at the remotest period to which 
historical records reach. Did nature bestow upon primitive man some instinct 
akin to that by which she has been supposed to teach the brute to select the 
nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indiscriminately mixed in 
forest and pasture ? 
This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has been 
