98 BREEDING AND REARING 



from congenital varieties: the native and original pure 

 breeds are mostly unknown to us. In the natural history of 

 the dog, I have already had occasion to notice that these 

 varieties or breeds in the canine race have been generated by 

 various causes, as climate, peculiarity in food, restraint, and 

 domestication. Man, active in promoting his own benefit, 

 has watched these gradual alterations, and has improved and 

 extended them by aiding the causes that tend to their 

 production, and by future care has perpetuated and made 

 them permanently his own. 



Many of the varieties among dogs and other domestic 

 animals are the effect of monstrosity, and have arisen from 



his partners might hack him, until they all became monuments of perishing 

 excellence : their cultivated talent would infallibly starve them. 



As promoters of the ease and comforts of mankind, every one yields the 

 well-merited honours that are distributed among our enterprising cattle 

 breeders ; but the philosopher, retired from the world, and the naturalist, 

 contemplating his subject freed from extraneous bearings, regard the boasted 

 excellencies of our domestic animals in general as monstrosities. The ma- 

 jestic large breed of heavy carthorses, cultivated to their present stature by 

 the luxuriant nature of the herbage in this and some other countries, would 

 be ill calculated to save themselves from beasts of prey, by either flight or 

 active resistance : their immense weight would sink them in loose soils, that 

 their more agile originals would bound over with instinctive celerity ; and 

 the scanty herbage in nature's wilds would ill suffice their multiplied wants. 

 With the ox and sheep a constitutional obesity is encouraged, until the fat 

 and muscular parts are totally disproportioned to the bony mass that is to 

 support them, which lessens, according to modern excellence, in an inverse 

 proportion to its necessities; and, as though the degeneration was not suffi- 

 ciently pursued, in the polled breeds those original marks of distinction and 

 safety, the horns, also yield to the sacrifice. 



Even the finest edibles amongst our garden bulbs, as the carrot, parsnip, 

 &c. &c. are monstrosities, enlarged at the expense of the stem and other 

 parts ; and the disproportionate magnitude of our fruit is attributable to the 

 monstrosity of the pericarp. It is not attempted to argue that these are not 

 actual advantages to mankind, nor to detract from the merit that has intro- 

 duced these acknowledged improvements ; it is merely suggested to shew 

 that a misconception and mis-appropriation of terms often arise according as 

 the subject is viewed by the naturalist or the rural economist. 



