THE TAMING OF THE WILD 275 



friends, it showed its teeth. When a rat shows 

 its teeth, a little distance lends enchantment to 

 the view. 



Nor is even the employment of an animal to 

 do useful work quite all that is meant by 

 domestication. It is only so much of it as is 

 comprised in taming. The Indian elephant is 

 the faithful servant of man, carrying him in 

 the jungle, either on errands of peace or in 

 operations against tigers, stacking his timber in 

 the teak forests of Burma and elsewhere, and 

 even feeding the saws in the Chinese timber 

 yards at Rangoon with logs, using both tusks 

 and trunk and very rarely getting foul of the 

 machinery. Yet the Indian elephant has not 

 appreciably changed in appearance during all 

 its centuries of domestication. It is outwardly 

 the same to-day as its wild kinsmen in the 

 jungle. If, on the other hand, we compare the 

 woolly sheep of our English pastures with the 

 straight-haired sheep of the Himalaya, we shall 

 find their coats as unlike as the heads of a 

 negro and a Norwegian. It is really difficult 

 to believe that a South Down ewe and an Ovis 

 Ammon are members of the same family. 

 Humped Indian cattle, English bulldogs, mas- 

 sive shire horses and Yorkshire pigs are quite 

 different in appearance from any wild animal 

 in existence, and their transformation has been 

 the work of untold centuries. Such change is 



