100 INTRODUCTION. 



had had other results, it would still have remained 

 to be decided, whether a litter wholly of wolf ex- 

 traction was capable of domesticity. The specimens 

 hitherto reduced to familiarity, had been all bred 

 up in confinement ; those showing attachment, we 

 believe, were, with one exception, she-wolves ; and 

 in no case were they ever sufficiently liberated to 

 determine, whether, with all their docility, they 

 would not have taken the road to the forest and 

 resumed the character assigned them by Nature, on 

 the first favourable opportunity, or as soon as the 

 first case of excitement appealed to their sensa- 

 tions. 



We leave it to physiologists to inform us of the 

 facts, if such there be, in the whole circle of mam- 

 miferous animals, where the influence of man, by 

 education and servitude, has been able to develope 

 and combine faculties and anatomical forms so dif- 

 ferent and opposite as we see them in different races 

 of dogs, unless the typical species were first in pos- 

 session of their rudiments. We do not pretend to 

 deny a certain influence to education even on the 

 external form, and to servitude and misery that 

 degeneracy which will produce some corresponding 

 decrease of size. But climate cannot have effected 

 much difference in the growth, since the two ex- 

 tremes are found both in hot and cold countries. 

 Nor can food have had a material influence, since 

 man, existing entirely on vegetables or on fish, 

 retains all his faculties as well as when he subsists 

 on flesh ; and to a late period in the history of 



