DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 69 



plain lands from its original home among the pin- 

 nacles of the world. A haystack is a mountain 

 peak, from which this child of the sky can view 

 the world. It is a sentinel place. 



The ability of the goat to subsist on almost any- 

 thing it can pick up is also an accomplishment 

 which it developed up there in those bleak and bar- 

 ren altitudes whither it had been driven by the 

 pitiless mouths of the lowlands. It has been up in 

 these deserts of the sky that goats have spent most 

 of their racial existence and laid the foundations 

 of their nervous and muscular systems, that is, 

 there is where they were manufactured. 



The goat doesn't eat newspapers and old rags 

 for pastime. It digests them. Paper is made 

 from wood, and rags from cotton fibre, which is 

 chemically similar to wood. An important part of 

 all woody fibre is a substance called cellulose. Cel- 

 lulose is chemically the same as starch. It is also 

 like starch in the fact that when it is digested it 

 changes to sugar. We can digest cellulose in a 

 test-tube by pouring sulphuric acid on it. Put sul- 

 phuric acid on a piece of newspaper and it will 

 change to sugar. But we can't digest cellulose in 

 our bodies, because w r e haven't the right chemicals 

 in our digestive fluids. But the goat can. The 

 goat has four stomachs. It is what is called a 

 ruminant. It chews its cud. All of the cud-chew- 

 ing animals have stomachs composed of four com- 

 partments. And they are able to include in their 



