820 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



It is thus seen that four out of the twenty-one domesticated 

 Mammalia may, with very considerable probability, be supposed 

 to have been first domesticated in Central Asia, and though the 

 non-cosmopolitanism of the two camels, Camelus hactrianus and 

 Camelus . drofnedarlMS, renders them less available for my present 

 purpose, that, viz., of pointing out the great changes which man 

 has effected in transporting into all parts of the world what 

 he found only in some more or less circumscribed portions of it, 

 the facts of the Central Asiatic origin of the two-humped variety 

 or species, and of the South-western Asiatic, or at least Arabic, 

 origin of the one-humped dromedary, bear not a little on the 

 whole question. 



I do not omit the dog and the pig ^ from the list of the animals 



Eev. Wm. Houghton, 1. c). Speaking of the possible derivation of the greyhound from 

 an Asiatic home * somewhere to the westward of the great Asiatic mountain chains 

 where the easternmost Bactrian and Persian plains commence, and where the steppes 

 of the Scythic nations spread towards the north,' Col. Hamilton Smith says, 'when 

 we look to the present proofs of this conclusion and assume that where the largest 

 and most energetic breeds of the race exist, there may we look for their original 

 habitations, we then find, to the east of the Indus, the very large greyhounds of the 

 Deccan, to the west of it the powerful Persian breed, and to the north of the Caspian 

 the great rough greyhound of Tartary and Russia, and thence we may infer that they 

 were carried by the migrating colonies westward across the Hellespont, and by earlier 

 Celtic and later Teutonic tribes along the levels of Northern Germany as far as Britain.' 

 It is curious that Colonel H. Smith should not in this connexion have mentioned the 

 Thibetan dog, figured by himself, 1. c, with the tan-coloured supra-orbital stripe, 

 common so significatively to this variety and to the Mexican Alco. For the Thibetan 

 mastiff has long been known to be one of the largest varieties of the species, and quite 

 recently (see 'Times,' Dec. 26, 1879) Mr. Baber, the consular resident at Szechuen, 

 is reported as writing of them as the largest dogs he had ever seen. 



* That the Central Asiatic wild boar lends itself readily to domestication is thus 

 expressed by Pallas, ' Zoographia Rosso- Asiatica,' p. 269 : ' Porcelli cicurari as- 

 suescunt facile et cum domesticis generant.' And Radde's words ('Reisen im Siiden von 

 Ost-Sibirien,' 1862, i. 236) are as much or more to the point, as they apply to adult 

 animals: 'So muss ich gestehen, dass sie selir friedlicher Natur sind und es mir 

 mehrmals passirte mittelalte Wildschweine sich mir bis aufvier Faden weite nahen 

 zu sehen.' If the so-called ' wild ' boar is so tame as to allow this so many centuries 

 after the invention of gunpowder, it is easy to understand that it may have been much 

 more amenable to man's influence thousands of years before that discovery. As regards 

 the dog, it seems probable that even within the limits of the Central Asiatic region 

 we are dealing with, two very distinct wild stocks may have furnished corresponding 

 tame ones. The large Indian dog, or Hyrcanian dog of the ancients, may very reason- 

 ably be supposed (as suggested by Fitzinger) to have been the parent-stock of the 

 modern Thibetan mastiff, whilst Pallas says that the Kalmuck domestic dog is so like 

 the jackal of the same region that it is impossible not to consider them identical. See 

 * Spicilegia Zoologica,' Fasc. xi. 



