DOGS AND SAVAGES. 675 



American aborigines can not be measured by means of historical data, 

 but may, perhaps, be estimated in another way. The meal industry is 

 without doubt the most significant feature of the civilization of these 

 tribes to whom the use of milk and its products is entirely uuknown. 

 The Old World used only innocuous grain food plants, increasing tbem 

 by cultivation and forming from their products meal and bread. In 

 South America, on the contrary, a very poisonous, quickly fatal plant 

 is first deprived of its poison, and the porridge then made from it is 

 rendered palatable by the addition of the juice from the little Limonia, 

 the bark of Dicypellium caryophyllatum, ants, or honey. The customs 

 of changing the fruit of the Gulielma speciosa, of producing yellow par- 

 rot feathers by means of frog's blood (among the Munderucus), and 

 many similar ones that are widely spread also point to an old civiliza- 

 tion with which many races of dogs may have been contemporaneous. 



In southeastern Asia we meet with a word for the dog that means 

 animals in general; in another case his designation is the same as that 

 for the horse, the pig, and carnivorous animals, and the same obtains 

 in the Ural-altaic, Slavic, and Germanic tongues, where the designations 

 for dog, wolf, and fox have often the same origin. Three thousand 

 years ago the Chinese called all the nomads of the west dogs, and the 

 word dog in Turko-Tatar was derived from "et v (low, base) or from 

 "hurt" (greedy animal). The Turanian ideogram for dog is tir-Jcu, 

 which, according to Halevy, is derived from ur (flesh-eating) and Jcu 

 (domestic). It is striking that the root words for dog and bear never 

 agree, while those for dog and the smaller carnivone sometimes do go. 



The statement of Leland, "all ignorant and unscientific people give 

 to unnamed animals the name of some creature with which they are 

 familiar," holds good for the savages of Australia and Oceanica. Many 

 words for dog, such as keru, signify also animals in general; so, also, 

 Jceru Icejerik, the rat animal, i. e., cat (Museum Godeffroy, I, 43); others 

 signify also pig — for example, buga, brooas (Pott, Etymology. Faseh- 

 ungen, II, 1, 138). Kittlitz (II, 8) remarks that after one had once seen 

 a pig every large animal, even the cat, was called cochon, just as the 

 Jakuts use the Mongolian word for pig (chacliai) as a designation for 

 the leopard. At Queen Charlotte Sound the natives called all the quad- 

 rupeds that Cook had with him dogs. (Voyage toward the South Pole, 

 I, 125.) As the sailors in calliug the dog toward them said " come 

 here," so the inhabitants of Mortlock Isla d afterwards called the dog 

 " coinehere." 



In the Yerdidad, the oldest and most genuine portion of Zendavesta, 

 it is said: "The world is maintained by the intelligence of the dog," 

 and Brehm adds to this : " We can not conceive of savage man without 

 the dog; still less can we imagine the educated and cultivated inhabit- 

 ants of the thickly populated parts of the earth." The dog is a part 

 of man himself. He is, as Fr. Cuvier expresses it, the most remarkable, 

 complete, and useful acquisition which man has ever made. 



