84 INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION. 



sembles tlie ox, the ibex and the chamois assimilate themselves to 

 the goat and the sheep ; but while the wild animal does not ap- 

 pear to be a destructive agency in the garden of nature, his do- 

 mestic congeners are eminently so.* This is partly from the 

 change of habits resulting from domestication and association 

 with man, partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed 

 animals is not determined 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 compara- 

 tively few things, amenable to the control of the merely phys- 

 ical arrangements 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 emancipa- 

 tion of household quadrupeds — he becomes again an unresisting 

 subject 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 auxihary 

 in the warfare his master is ever waging against all existences ex- 

 cept those which he can tame to a wilhng servitude. 



animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may be 

 found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Thoreau's Excursions, pp. 

 135 et seq. 



I once saw several quarts of beach-nuts taken from the winter quarters of a 

 family of flying-squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were neatly stripped 

 of their shells and carefully stored in a dry cavity, 



* 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." — Tei'ra, or PMlosopMcal 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 sufScient 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. 



