VIII 



DOMESTIC ANIMALS 



Long before Jubal became the father of all such as 



handle the harp and the organ and Tubalcain the 



instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, Abel 



was a keeper of sheep, but the sacred writer has not 



informed us how he first caught them and tamed 



them. If we consult other records of the infancy 



of the human race, they reveal as little. When the 



Egyptians began to portray their daily life on stone 



6,000 or 7,000 years ago, they already had cattle 



and sheep, geese and ducks and dogs and plenty of 



asses, though not horses. They got these from the 



Assyrians, who had used them in their chariots long 



before they began to record anything. 



Further back than this we have no one to question 



except those shadowy men of the Stone Age who 



have left us heaps of their implements, but none of 



their bones. They were not so careful of the bones 



of horses, which he in thousands about the precincts 



of their untidy villages, but not a scrawl on a bit 



of a mammoth tusk has been found to indicate 



whether these were ridden and driven, or only 



hunted and eaten. 



90 



