INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS. 17 



know not their history or their epochs ; and if 

 we believe them to be in fact human conquests, 

 and not rather special birthday gifts from the 

 hand of the Creator, we must admit that culti- 

 vation and domestication have so completely 

 metamorphosed and diversified the forms and 

 products, and modified the habits, and even, so 

 to speak, the inborn instincts, of both vegetables 

 and animals, that but the fewest of our house- 

 hold beasts and our familiar plants can be cer- 

 tainly identified with the primitive stock. Most 

 of these, it is probable, no longer occur in their 

 wild state and original form ; and it is question- 

 able whether they are even capable of continued 

 existence without the fostering care of man. 1 

 In both these great divisions of organic life 



1 It is not the domestic animals alone, whose existence is 

 perpetuated by the protective, though often unconscious, 

 agency of man. In the depths of our northern forests the 

 voice of the song-bird, or of the smaller quadrupeds, is but 

 seldom heard. It is in the fields tilled by human husbandry 

 that they find the most abundant nutriment, and the surest 

 retreat from bird and beast of prey. The vast flights of the 

 wild pigeon are found, not in the remote, primitive wood- 

 lands, but along the borders of the pioneer settlements ; and, 

 upon our western frontier, it is observed that the deer, the 

 hare, and other feeble animals multiply for a time after the 

 coming in of the whites, because the civilized huntsman de- 

 stroys or scares away the wolf, the great natural enemy of the 

 weaker quadrupeds, and checks the spread of the prairie 

 fires, which often surprise their young. 



