IN DOMKtiTlCATKD ANIMALS. 249 



which stand and hunt best. On the other liund, habit 

 alone in some cases has sufficed; hardly any animal is 

 more difficult to tame than the young of the wild rabbit; 

 scarcely any animal is tamer than the young of the tame 

 rabbit; but I can hardly suppose that domestic rabbits have 

 often been selected for tameness alone; so that we must 

 attribute at least the greater part of the inherited change 

 from extreme wildness to extreme tameness, to habit and 

 long-continued close confinement. 



Natural instincts are lost under domestication: a re- 

 markable instance of this is seen in those breeds of fowls 

 which A^ery rarely or never become "broody," that is, never 

 wish to sit on their eggs. Familiarity alone prevents our 

 seeing how largely and how permanently the minds of our 

 domestic animals have been modified. It is scarcely pos- 

 sible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive 

 in the dog. All wolves, foxes, jackals and species of the cat 

 genus, when kept tame, are most eager to attack poultry, 

 sheep and pigs; and this tendency has been found incur- 

 able in dogs which have been brought home as puppies from 

 countries such as Tierra del Fuego and Australia, where the 

 savages do not keep these domestic animals. How rarely, on 

 the other hand, do our civilized dogs, even when quite 

 young, require to be taught not to attack poultry, sheep and 

 pigs! No doubt they occasionally do make an attack, and 

 are then beaten; and if not cured, they are destroyed; 

 so that habit and some degree of selection have proba- 

 bly concurred in civilizing by inheritance our dogs. On 

 the other hand, young chickens have lost wholly by habit, 

 that fear of the dog and cat which no doubt was originally 

 * instinctive in them, for I am informed by Captain Hutton 

 that the young chickens of the parent stock, the Gallus 

 ibankiva, when reared in India under a hen, are at first ex- 

 cessively wild. So it is with young pheasants reared in 

 England under a hen. It is not that chickens have lost all 

 fear, but fear only of dogs and cats, for if the hen gives 

 the danger chuckle they will run (more especially young 

 turkeys) from under her and conceal themselves in the 

 surrounding grass or thickets; and this is evidently done 

 for the instinctive purpose of allowing, as we see in wild 

 ground-birds, their mother to fly away. But this instinct 

 retained by our chickens has become useless under domes- 



