PEODUCED BY MAN. 821 



were 

 were 



which there is good reason, to my judgment, for thinking 

 domesticated in Central Asia, because I do not think they 

 domesticated within that area, but because, I cannot deny, that 

 it is probable they were also domesticated elsewhere. But it may 

 fairly be suggested that the art, skill, and craft of domesticating 

 these and the other six animals having been first learnt in Central 

 Asia, spread thence; and that thus all or nearly all the acqui- 

 sitions which man has made in the way of domestication, may thus 

 owe their origin — if not in the way of actual blood-lineage, yet in 

 that of being the fruits of man's experience acquired there — to the 

 district in question. 



I pass by a natural transition to point out very shortly, not the 

 cardinal necessity of the possession of the sheep, goat, ox, horse, 

 camel, pig, and dog, for food and clothing, for locomotion, and for 

 carrying on the processes of the hunting, of the pastoral and of the 

 agricultural life, but how that necessity has been unconsciously 

 recognised by man in certain of his earliest institutions. 



Of these seven mammals, six are now distributed over the face 

 of the whole habitable world ; but long before this had become the 

 case with any one of them, except possibly the dog, man had expressed 

 unconsciously, if not quite inarticulately, his recognition of their 

 value by using them in one way or another for one or another of 

 his most sacred rights and ceremonies. The single Latin word 

 ' Suovetaurilia,' denoting a particular kind of sacrifice of the 

 swine, the sheep, and the ox, which is figured on many a tablet 

 found in this as in other countries, and was performed at great 

 crises of Rome's fate, may suflftce as regards the three animals 

 which speak so plainly to our eyes in those sculptures. To Eastern 

 and to Western people it was indifferent (see Exod. xii. 5, Ps. 1. 9, 

 and classical writers passim) whether sheep or goats were taken out 

 of the fold for this purpose. As regards the dog, Livy (xl. 6) tells 

 us that in the Purification of a Macedonian army the two halves 

 of a dog's body were placed, one on one side, one on the other, of 

 the road along which the soldiers were passed. Similarly, we are 

 told by the Arab Ahmed Ibn-Fozlan, who must have witnessed 

 the proceeding with a good deal of repulsion, that a dog was cut in 

 half and put into the ship in which a Norse chief was burnt in the 

 tenth century on the banks of the Volga (see Anderson, * Proc. 

 Scot. Soc. Antiq.,' May 13, 1872, p. 522); and I have myself 



