SPECIES AND VARIETIES. 639 



in the case of animals that are sick, and his death was daily 

 looked for. Once more, however, his health returned, his 

 glossy fur was restored to him, and his keepers could again 

 approach him. But his former gaiety never returned : he 

 submitted to the soothing of his keepers, but he answered 

 the advances of strangers only with menaces. 



Let us be just, then, to the loathed and persecuted Wolf, 

 with respect to those attributes with which Nature has sup- 

 plied him. In the state of nature, he possesses the habits 

 and attributes which adapt him to his condition. But let 

 him be withdrawn from the wild and savage state in which 

 he must subsist, be relieved from the pressure of his natural 

 wants, be aided by human intelligence, and soothed by the 

 sympathy for which he is formed to be grateful, and we pro- 

 duce a change, which may well be deemed the triumph of 

 reason over the wildest propensities of inferior natures. The 

 Wolf, in truth, becomes a Dog, a member of that commu- 

 nity of creatures which have become humanized, as it were, by 

 intercourse with us, which yield up their powers to our service, 

 which will remain attached to us when all the world may for- 

 sake us, and will lay down their lives for our safety. But al- 

 though the Wolf be beyond any reasonable question a Dog, yet 

 it is not to be maintained that all dogs are derived from the 

 Wolf. The Canidse of many species are spread over all the 

 world, are probably all endowed with the same faculty of 

 submitting themselves to human power, and, so far as is yet 

 known, or a fair analogy will lead us to infer, are capable of 

 breeding with one another, and producing a common race, in 

 the domesticated state. But when the people of distant re- 

 gions met and became mixed together, as was the case with the 

 inhabitants of Europe and Western Asia, it may reasonably 

 be believed that dogs of the different kinds which had been 

 domesticated would be brought together, forming a race, 

 like the human inhabitants, of mixed descent. But then it 

 may be asked, is not the Dog, the Canis familiaris of Lin- 

 ii8Qus, a species ? The answer, as has again and again been 



