72 Life and Letters of Francis (w'alton 



When we pass from the palaeolithic to the neolithic stage we are not, 

 unfortunatelv, able to trace the pet developing into the domesticated iinimal. 

 What tloes seem to loom throngli the mist of prehistory is a series of races 

 each with a more or leas completed culture breaking up an older culture, a 

 race which has domesticated cattle, a race which has domesticated horees, a 

 race living with dogs or with reindeer; they loom upon us from the unknown, 

 replacing less effective cultures. This does not exclude the domesticated 

 animal arising from the pet, but it does suggest that either environment or 

 religious belief led to pets of a certain type, and that only certain groups 

 had the inspiration to turn their pets to the service of the group. Galton 

 states that when he travelled in Damaraland the chiefs took pleasure in 

 their herds of cattle rather for their stateliness and colour tlian for their 

 beef — they were as the deer of an English squire. 



"An Ox was almost a sacred beast in Damaraland, not to be killed except on momentous 

 ocoaaions, and then as a sort of sacrificial fwist, in which all V)ystander8 shared. The payment 

 of two oxen was hush money for the life of a man. I was considerably embarrassed by finding 

 that I ha<l the greatest troul)le in buying oxen for my own use, with the ordinary articles of 

 barter. The poesessors would hardly part with them for any remuneration ; they would never 

 sell their handsomest beasts." (p. 135.) 



The possibility that the pet was a totem, or an animal of religious 

 character, might throw light on the association of special domestic animals 

 with definite races and their cultures. 



A paper which may be considered in relation to that on "Domestication" 

 may be fitly referred to here, as it also arose from Galton's travel-experience. 

 It is entitled : " Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men." It was published in 

 Macmillans Magazine for 187-'. The theme of this article is a remarkable 

 one, namely that our remote ancestors lived in herds or packs and that this 

 gregarious or herd instinct is the source of many of nian's intellectual weak- 

 nesses in his advanced civilisation*. The same idea of the instinct of the 

 herd in man appears to have occurred to a number of writers recently, but 

 they do not seem to have known or at any rate do not acknowledge Galton's 

 priority of idea. The most interesting point of the article lies not only in 

 the fact that Galton here assumes that he ha« in the earlier memoirs, which 

 will shortly be discussed, proved the inheritance of the mental and moral 

 characters in man, but in the fact that he stands definitely on the Darwinian 

 platform and considers what heredity and selection have made of man. He 

 opens his paper with the following description of its aims : 



"I propose, in these pages, to discuss a curious and apparently anomalous group of base 

 moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies, to trace their analogies in the world of brutes, and 

 to examine the conditions, through which they have lieen evolved. I speak of the slavish apti 

 tudes, from which the leaders of men, and the heroes and the prophets, are exempt, but which 

 are irrepressible elements in the disposition of average men. I refer to the natural tendency 

 of the vast majority of our race to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone, 

 to their exaltation of the vox poptUi, even when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of 

 nobodies, into the vox Dei, to their willing servitude to tradition, authority and custom. Also, 



' Vol. xxni, pp. 35.3-7. 



' Gallon docs not say that it may also be the source of some of his higher altruistic 

 sympathies and social habits, but he had recognised this in his paper of 1865. 



