THE PROBLEM OF DOMESTICATION 225 



workshops where the capitaHsts are doing the best they can 

 to better the mode of living of the people who are under 

 their charge. In this good work it may well be possible to 

 include a share of contact with the soil and with domesti- 

 cated animals. In this system of isolated factories we may 

 perhaps hope to find the way out of the perplexities which 

 the present condition of our industries have imposed on our 

 civilization. 



Up to our present half-century the process of winning 

 animals and plants to domestication, and of improving 

 them after they had been thus won, has been in its 

 nature a matter of haphazard. Here and there, as men 

 have seen creatures which promised in captivity to afford 

 either pleasure or profit, they have endeavored to convert 

 them to use. In some cases the effort has been made with 

 some patience and steadfastness of purpose. If the creature 

 yielded quickly to the needs of a new life which it was 

 sought to impose upon him, he became a member of man's 

 family. If its wilderness motives were strong, the effort to 

 domesticate was soon abandoned. The greater part of these 

 efforts to win animals and plants into alliance with our race 

 have been made with the creatures which were native in 

 the wildernesses about our ancestral dwelling-places. Occa- 

 sionally from distant lands important gains have been made, 

 especially among the food-giving plants ; but all the animals 

 of any importance which ha-ve been adopted by the Aryan 

 people were originally natives of the lands in which that race 

 has dwelt. 



It is a remarkable fact that no sooner does a wild animal 

 or plant become intimately associated with man, than it at 

 once departs more or less widely from its ancient type. Our 



