40 HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. 



wandering savage grows no cultivated 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 Hon, 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 the booty of beasts and birds of prey. 

 But with stationary life, or at latest with the pastoral state, man 

 at once commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the 

 forms of animal and vegetable existence around him, and as he 

 advances in civilization, he gradually eradicates or transforms 

 every spontaneous product of the soil he occupies.* 



Humcm and Brute Action Compared. 



It is maintained by authorities as high as any known to modern 

 science, that the action of man upon nature, though greater in 

 degree, does not differ in Tcind from that of wild animals. It is 



Tiet 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 domesticated 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. — Ziel en Ligchaam, p. 128, n. 



Perhaps the half -wild character ascribed by P. Lsestadius and other Swedish 

 writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the compara- 

 tive shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed. The 

 domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary, and the biiffalo 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 f uUy reclaimed from it. 



* The difference between the relations of savage life and of incipient civil- 

 ization to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Mississippi which 

 was once occupied by the mound builders and afterwards by the far less de- 

 veloped Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields which must have been 

 cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhabited those regions, per- 

 ished or were driven out, the soil fell back to the normal forest state, and the 

 savages who succeeded the more advanced race interfered very little, if at all, 

 ■with the ordinary course of spontaneous nature 



