356 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



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 probably 

 concurred in civilizing by inheritance our dogs. On the 

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

 that feur of the dog and cat which no doubt was origi- 

 nally instinctive in them; for I am informed by Captain 

 Hutton that the young chickens of the parent-stock, the 

 Gallus bankiva, when reared in India under a hen, arc 

 at first excessively wild. So it is with young pheasant 

 reared in England under a hen. It is not that chickei 

 have lost all fear, but fear only of dogs and cats, for if j 

 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 domestication, for the mother-hen has 

 almost lost by disuse the power of flight. 



Hence, we may conclude that under domestication 

 instincts have been acquired, and natural instincts havt 

 been lost, partly by habit, and partly by man selecting 

 and accumulating, during successive generations, peculiai 

 mental babits and actions, which at first appeared froD 

 what we must in our ignorance call an accident. Ii 

 some cases compulsory habit alone has sufficed to pro 



