THE: NEW STONE AGE 
their meat and milk and hides and for their labor as pack 
and draught animals.’ We should probably say also that 
chickens were domesticated for the sake of their flesh and 
especially their eggs. 
But can we imagine primitive man, on seeing a herd of 
wild cattle crashing through the underbrush, at once 
grasping the possibility of using their milk for human food 
or their strength in helping his womenfolk to till the little 
garden plots in the forest? Or can we conceive of him as 
able to foresee the development of the wild jungle fowl, in 
the course of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of 
years, into the egg-laying strains that exist today? Such 
possibilities were not in the faintest degree apparent to 
any one on this earth in the days before the domestication 
of animals began or for long centuries later. Many of 
the most important qualities for which we now value 
animals did not exist at all when they were first domesti- 
cated and have been developed only by long-continued 
selective breeding. 
Superstition, the great driving force in the shaping of 
man’s actions in early times, played a very large and 
probably the leading part in the domestication of animals. 
Its influence in this direction had already begun to appear 
at least as far back as the later portions of the Old Stone 
Age. Those animals which played the most important 
réles as sources of food came in time to be the objects of 
many ceremonial observances and eventually to be re- 
garded as themselves sacred and especially fitted for 
sacrifice. From time to time man would capture in- 
dividuals of these species and keep them in confinement 
to be slain at certain festivals, just as the ancient Mexicans 
used to keep prisoners of war, or as some of the peoples of 
northeast Siberia keep captive bears, for the same purpose. 
Moreover, our distant predecessors felt that the pos- 
session of sacred animals brought good fortune to the 
group, and on this theory sacred bulls were kept in the 
temples of ancient Egypt, sacred horses in those of modern 
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