DOMESTICATION. 233 



T.astly, according to Mr. J. Shaw, " where the dog is valued 

 solely for food, as in the Polynesian Islands and China, it is 

 described as an extremely stupid animal,"* and White says, 

 in his " Natural History of Selborne,"t that these dogs have 

 lost some of w^hat we must regard as their strongest instincts, 

 for " though they are so strictly carnivorous animals, from 

 having been for so many generations fed on vegetable food 

 they have lost their instinctive taste for flesh." 



Thus much, then, for what we may call the negative in- 

 iluence of domestication, or its power of destroying natural 

 instincts. We shall now turn to the still more striking and 

 .suggestive side of the subject, viz., the positive influence of 

 domestication in developing new instincts not natural to the 

 species, but artificially produced by accumulative instruction 

 through successive generations, combined witli selection. And 

 here I shall confine myself to the species of domestic animal 

 in which these elfects have been most conspicuous, viz., the 

 Dog. Doubtless the reason why these effects are most con- 

 spicuous in the case of this animal is because his utility to 

 man has always depended mainly upon his intelligence, so 

 that man has here persistently directed the influences of 

 domestication towards an artificial shaping of that intelli- 

 gence. For it is in tliis connection of interest to observe 

 that the only features in the primitive psychology of the dog 

 which have certainly remained unaffected by contact with 

 man, are those features which, being neither useful nor harm- 

 ful to man, have never been either cultivated or repressed. 

 Such is the case, for example, with the instincts of covering 

 excrement, rollino- in filth, turnino- round and round to make 

 a bed, hiding food, &c.t 



As evidence of the positive influences of domestication on 

 the psychology of the dog, I may first draw attention to what 

 occurs to me as a very suggestive case. One of the most dis- 



* This sentence occurs as a quotation in a letter by Mr. Shaw to 

 Mr. Darwin, but the reference is not supplied. 



t Letter 57. 



:|: La INIalle says that it is not until dogs are ten or twelve months old 

 that they be^in to bury superfluous food. This, if true, would point to the 

 conclusion that the instinct was one lately acquired in the history of the 

 wild species, and therefore presumably is not so firmly fixed as tlie instincts 

 of wildness, fierceness, attacking poultry, and so on, which have been so 

 completely eradicated by liuman apency. 



