202 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



as that. Let us begin with savage times. Here we find 

 man living in natural eaves, in temporary shelters, or often 

 in the open, like the beasts of the field. He lives in small 

 tribes, families or clans, and subsists by hunting and fishing, 

 by gathering natural fruits. He clothes himself, when nec- 

 essary, with the skins of animals. Food is often scarce, 

 and periodically his numbers are decimated by famine. His 

 warfare with the wild beasts at this stage results in much 

 loss of human life ; but this is trivial, compared with the 

 ceaseless conflicts between rival clans and tribes of men. 

 This is the chief reason for the very sparse population of 

 savage countries. One savage man can hardly eke out a 

 wretched subsistence in a range of territory whose natural 

 resources might support a thousand civilized persons in com- 

 fort. In a word, the life of the savage is chiefly a brutal 

 struggle against all nature, including his brother man. 



The first great step upward from this condition of abject 

 savagery was domestication of animals. This I consider to 

 be elementary zoology for public school courses in nature 

 study. Sa}-s Professor Shaler on this topic: "From this 

 point of view our domesticated creatures should be pre- 

 sented to our people, with the purpose in mind of bring- 

 ing them to see that the process of domestication has a 

 far-reaching aspect, a dignity, we may fairly say a grandeur, 

 that few human actions possess. In a large way the work 

 of domestication represents one of the modes of action of 

 that sympathetic motive which more than any other has been 

 the basis of the highest development of mankind." The es- 

 sential value in the process is found in the development in 

 the men who did the work of sufficient intelligence and sym- 

 pathy with nature to discover friends and helpers among the 

 animal life about them. The dog was the first animal do- 

 mesticated, and this is still the idol of the child's heart. 

 Then came the horse, horned cattle, sheep, poultry and 

 swine, — almost all of them before the dawn of authentic 

 history. The latest acquisition, according to Professor Sha- 

 ler, is the turkey, which was taken to Europe about four 

 hundred years ago, domesticated, and later brought back to 

 this country. 



