38 DESTEUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 



protected the birds wliicli prey on tlie insects most destructive to 

 his own harvests. 



1 Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes comparatively 

 little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destructive 



* It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the do- 

 mestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, belongs, 

 not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization ; the con- 

 quest of inorganic nature, almost as exclusively to the most advanced stages of 

 artificial culture. Civilization has added little to the number of vegetable or 

 animal species grown in our fields or bred in our folds — the cranberry and the 

 wild grape being almost the only plants which the Anglo-American has re- 

 claimed out of our vast native flora and added to his harvests — while, on the con- 

 trary, the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of 

 man's sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her substance 

 and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined and 

 cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as a 

 projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest savages. 

 The apphcation of compressed air to the same purpose in the blowpipe is 

 more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the inclined plane, the 

 wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems almost imknown except 

 to civilized man. I have myself seen European peasants to whom one of the 

 simplest applications of this latter power was a revelation. 



It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the psy- 

 chology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly developed 

 intellects in civilized life, that although these humble tribes and individuals 

 sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of the lower animals to the gratification of 

 their appetites and the supply of their other physical wants, yet they neverthe- 

 less seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies 

 which are much more feebly felt by civilized men. May we not ascribe to 

 this sympathy the fact that Homer does not refer to the ass as a type of stu- 

 pidity, nor to the swine as an example of uncleanness ? The father of Ulysses 

 is called the god-like swineherd. 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 quadi'uped or bird, though per- 

 secuted as a destroyer of other animals more useful to man, or hunted for 

 food, is regarded with pecuhar respect, one might almost say, affection. The 

 Ainos, after killing a bear, sit round the body in great solemnity, as if wor- 

 shipping, and offer it food and drink. Some of the North American aborigi- 

 nal 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 "ii Mcenda 

 Styrke og tolv Mcends Vid," ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but 



