40 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
vegetable, fells no forest, and extirpates no useful plant, no 
noxious weed. If his skill in the chase enables him to entrap 
numbers of the animals on which he feeds, he compensates this 
loss by destroying also the lion, the tiger, the wolf, the otter, the 
seal, and the eagle, thus indirectly protecting the feebler 
quadrupeds and fish and fowls, which would otherwise become 
hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an original 
faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar to persons 
engaged in sheep husbandry in New England—and I have seen it confirmed by 
personal observation—that sheep bred where the commun laurel, as it is called, 
Kalmia angustifolia, abounds, almost always avoid browsing upon the leaves 
of that plant, while those brought from districts where laurel is unknown, 
and turned into pastures where it grows, very often feed upon it and are 
poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hereditary instinct, of a different 
character, may not improperly be noticed here. I refer to that by which 
horses bred in provinces where quicksands are common avoid their dangers or 
extricate themselves from them. See BREMONTIER, Mémoire sur les Dunes, 
Annales des Ponts et Charssées, 1833: premier sémestre, pp. 155-157. 
Tt is commonly said in New England, and I believe with reason, that the 
crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows which 
were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plunderers of the 
cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented for its protec- 
tion. ; 
Schroeder van der Kolk, in Het Verschil tusschen den Psychischen Aanleg 
van het Dier en van den Mensch, cites many interesting facts respecting 
instincts lost, or newly developed and become hereditary, in the lower animals, 
and he quotes Aristotle and Pliny as evidence that the common quadrupeds 
and fowls of our fields and our poultry yards were much less perfectly domes- 
ticated in their times than long, long ages of servitude have now made them. 
Among other instances of obliterated instincts, this author states that in 
Holland, where, for centuries, the young of the cow has been usually taken 
from the dam at birth and fed by hand, calves, even if left with the mother, 
make no attempt to suck; while in England, where calves are not weaned 
until several weeks old, they resort to the udder as naturally as the young of 
wild quadrupeds.— Zid en Ligchaam, p. 128, n. 
Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Lestadius and other 
Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the 
comparative shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed, 
The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary and the buffalo of Southern 
Italy are so wild and savage as to be very dangerous to all but their keepers, 
The former have relapsed into their original condition, the latter, perhaps, have 
never been fully reclaimed from it. 
