1S DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
are often found buried with human remains, as would be likely 
with special favorites. In those days, of course, animals were 
not yet domesticated for food, but only to assist in the hunt, an 
inference perfectly safe from the fact that most of the remains 
in the middens are of deer and reindeer, even yet not domesti- 
cated.1 In all these various ways the history of domestication of 
many if not most of our animals is well known, if not in detail, 
at least in a general way. 
Not always able to identify the original. However this may 
be, and however confident we may feel as to the processes of 
domestication, we often cannot speak with assurance of the 
exact wild species from which each particular domestic animal 
has been developed. We know that the ancestor was a wild 
animal, but which one or ones of the many similar races that 
must have existed in those remote times we have but scanty 
means of knowing. 
This is partly because, through breeding and care, all domes- 
ticated races have been greatly changed from their appearance 
in the wild state, and partly because in very many cases the wild 
original may itself have changed, or even, perhaps, long ceased 
to exist anywhere on earth; indeed, it looks sometimes as if 
domestication had been the principal if not the only means of 
saving some of our most valuable species from utter extinction 
long ago. 
Distinction between feral and wild. Until recent years im- 
mense numbers of so-called wild cattle, and of wild horses as 
well, roamed over our own western plains and over the pampas 
of South America. Such animals are not truly wild, because 
they do not represent an original stock, being merely the de- 
scendants of the cattle and horses brought over by the Spanish 
invaders, some of which escaped and “ran wild.” Finding 
conditions favorable, such escaped specimens throve and freely 
multiplied, ultimately stocking the plains with roving bands of 
1 This statement may be questionable as to the reindeer, which is now 
semidomesticated. 
