206 ANIMAL ARTISANS 



African forests are mighty hunters. It may even be 

 that the neighbourhood of fierce animals aided the 

 early development of man; for the least developed 

 races are largely found in such places as Tierra del 

 Fuego, where, in the absence of savage beasts, savage 

 man had no inducement to arm and equip himself. 



But man has had an even more potent ally than 

 his own ingenuity which from remote antiquity has 

 invested him in the mind of the animal world with 

 something of the supernatural. He, and he alone, is 

 ever accompanied by the one element which the animal 

 mind cannot create, cannot understand, lives in con- 

 stant awe of, and dreads by night, when its courage 

 is greatest and that of man least steady. Fire that 

 pillar of cloud and flame which precedes not the aggre- 

 gate human host, but the smallest fragment of the 

 invading army, the constant and dreaded 'harbinger 

 of human presence, springing up, as the beasts must 

 think, automatically from the earth wherever man rests 

 his body, guarding him in sleeping and waking, and 

 always associated with his abode this, above all his 

 attributes, has for ages terrified and subdued the beasts. 



Since the first appearance of man in any given region 

 of the earth he has been teaching the beast to fear him; 

 and it is not until to-day, when he is absolutely their 

 master, and has in many instances totally destroyed 

 them, that he thinks of restoring on a tiny scale, and 

 on a few spots on the earth's surface, the " state of 

 Nature ; " and allowing those creatures which he dares 

 to experiment with, once more to lay aside that 

 acquired terror which makes them flee his presence. 



