SPECIES AND VARIETIES. 667 



regarded as one of the most useful triumphs which reason 

 has been permitted to gain over the instincts and habits 

 of the lower tribes of animals. We may believe, too, that 

 it was effected during the earliest periods of society, since 

 we can hardly conceive communities to have existed at all 

 in wild countries without such assistants, and since we 

 scarcely know a tribe, from the Esquimaux of the Arctic 

 wilderness to the savages of New Holland, so rude as not 

 to have appropriated the dogs of the countries they in- 

 habit. We may say that there is no period in the past 

 history of our species, of which we have any knowledge 

 at all, in which the Dog did not exist in the subjugated 

 state. We find him represented to us as a sign in the 

 heavens along with the Bull, the Ram, and the Goat, his 

 early fellows in the service of our race, nay, distinguished 

 from these by being placed in both hemispheres of the fir- 

 mament, first beneath the feet of Orion in the southern hemi- 

 sphere, and again in the northern, where he indicates the 

 place of Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars of the firma- 

 ment, from the heliacal rising of which, corresponding with 

 the extreme rise of the Nile, the Ethiopians and Egyptians 

 dated the commencement of their year. He is sculptured on 

 the earliest monuments of human arts, from the sacred caves 

 of the East, to the proud structures of Persepolis and the 

 Nile. By the Egyptians he was consecrated to their god 

 Anubis, whom they represented with the figure of a man 

 and the head of a dog ; and he enters into a mass of symbo- 

 lical representations, whose meaning cannot now be disco- 

 vered. Nor was the adoration of the Dog confined to this 

 singular people, so prone, like most of the African nations, 

 to pay a blind worship to the objects of the senses, but it 

 extended to almost all the members of the family termed 

 Caucasian. He was everywhere sacrificed to the gods ; and 

 traces of the same rites have been found in people so remote 

 as the worshippers of Brahma, the Phoenician Canaanites, 

 and the Teutons of Northern Europe, the latter, up to a pe- 



