DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 39 



agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing 

 as he advances in civilization, until the impoverishment, with 

 which liis exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threat- 

 ening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of preserving what 

 is left, if not of restoring what has been wantonly wasted. The 



they still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient supersti- 

 tion 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, Lappish Mythologi, Christiania, 1871, § 37, and the earlier authors there 

 <5ited. Drummond Hay's very interesting work on Morocco contains many 

 amusing notices of a similar feeling entertained by the Moors towards the re- 

 doubtable enemy of their flocks — the lion. 



This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all the do- 

 mestic animals — if indeed they ever existed in a wild state — were appropriated, 

 reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into organized and fixed 

 communities, that almost every known esculent plant had acquired substan- 

 tially its present artificial character, and that the properties of nearly all vege- 

 table 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 

 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 common 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 them- 

 selves from them. See Bremontier, Memoire sur les Dunes, Annalea des 

 Fonts et CJiaussees, 1833 : premier semestre, pp. 155-157. 



It 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 Set Versehil tusscTien den Psychischen AanUg van 



