840 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



influence of a false alarm many times in the day/ Surely whatever 

 the biped, who can foresee and ponderate, may think of the lot and 

 the future of the domestic Ruminants, their lot, to themselves, as 

 they are not troubled with anticipations, totals up an aggregate of 

 comfort and even of enjoyment far exceeding that which the majority 

 of wild graminivorous creatures of similar bulk ever obtain. A 

 flock of well-fed Cheviots, on a snowy moor, in all their hornless- 

 ness and helplessness as against violence, shows the traveller that 

 he is in a country whence wolves have entirely disappeared ; would 

 their lot be happier if they were exposed not merely to the winds 

 and sleets of Northumbria, but also to the attacks of wolves to 

 which even in France and Germany they would be liable ? 



We need not, however, travel in South Africa, as you have 

 done, to prove the point that dog-fights and bull-fights, cockpits 

 and shambles notwithstanding, domestication has, on the whole, 

 increased the sum of the happiness of the lower animals. Let us 

 by an easy effort of imagination figure to ourselves what would 

 become of the flocks and herds of sheep and oxen, 'even very much 

 cattle,' which are now living with as large a share of enjoyments 

 as, and a very much larger share of leisure at least than many of 

 their masters, if those masters were one and all to be swept away 

 by some epidemic. Suppose, as Dr. Roberts in his memoir on 

 * Spontaneous Generation ' (p. 39) has suggested, that the ferment 

 which produces some one or other of our worse forms of infectious 

 disease should ' sport,' as it is playfully styled, or vary, as a peach 

 may sport or vary into a nectarine ; and then suppose that the in- 

 creased malignity and infectiousness with which it might thus 

 become endowed, should as entirely destroy our own species within 

 these Islands, as of late years disease has been known to entirely 

 depopulate certain Polynesian islets, or as some analogously-de- 

 veloped disease may be supposed to have exterminated the horse in 

 South America within recent geological periods. There can be 

 very little doubt in the mind of anybody who has much experience 

 of the power of combination for mischief which dogs can, indepen- 

 dently of men, develope, even in a civilised and thickly populated 

 country, that in a few days after our disappearance they would be 

 masters of the country. The mere desire for blood which is so 

 eminently characteristic of the musteline carnivores would very 

 shortly and certainly show itself again in our old servants in their 



