86 ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF D-MESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 
eminently so.* This is partly from the change of habits re- 
sulting from domestication and association with man, partly 
from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is not de- 
termined by the natural relation of demand and spontaneous 
supply which regulates the multiplication of wild creatures, 
but by the convenience of man, who is, in comparatively few 
things, amenable to the control of the merely physical arrange- 
ments of nature. When the domesticated animal escapes from 
human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the horse, the goat, 
and perhaps the ass—which, so far as I know, are the only 
well-authenticated instances of the complete emancipation of 
household quadrupeds—he becomes again an unresisting sub- 
ject of nature, and all his economy is governed by the same 
laws as that of his fellows which have never been enslaved by 
man ; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he is an auxiliary 
in the warfare his master is ever waging against all existences 
except those which he can tame to a willing servitude. 
Origin and Transfer of Domestic Quadrupeds. 
Civilization is so intimately associated with certain inferior 
forms of animal life, if not dependent on them, that cultivated 
* Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its 
growth, ‘‘ The biting of cattle,” he remarks, ‘‘ gives a gentle loosening to the 
roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very 
breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is 
wholesome and marvellously cherishing.”—Terra, or Philosophical Discourse 
of Earth, p. 36. 
In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: ‘‘ Nice farmers consider the 
lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for 
the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the 
roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical 
farmer.”— Terra, same page. 
The ‘ philosophical farmer’? of the present day will not adopt these opinions 
without some qualification, and they certainly are not sustained by American 
observation, 
The Report of the Department of Agriculture for March and April, 1872, states 
that the native grasses are disappearing from the prairies of Texas, especially 
on the bottom-lands, depasturing by cattle being destructive to them. 
