Chap. vm. in Domesticated Animals. 211 



difficult to tame than the young of the wild rabbit ; scarcely any 

 animal is tamer than the young of the tame rabbit; but I can 

 hardly suppose that domestic rabbits have often been selected for 

 tameness alone ; so that we must attribute at least the greater part 

 of the inherited change from extreme wildness to extreme tame- 

 ness, to habit and long-continued close confinement. 



Natural instincts are lost under domestication: a remarkable 

 instance of this is seen in those breeds of fowls which very rarely 

 or never become " broody," that is, never wish to sit on their eggs. 

 Familiarity alone prevents our seeing how largely and how perma- 

 nently the minds of our domestic animals have been modified. It 

 is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become 

 instinctive in the dog. All wolves, foxes, jackals, and species of 

 the cat genus, when kept tame, are most eager to attack poultry, 

 sheep, and pigs; and this tendency has been found incurable in 

 dogs which have been brought home as puppies from countries such 

 as Tierra del Fuego and Australia, where the savages do not keep 

 these domestic animals. How rarely, on the other hand, do our 

 civilised dogs, even when quite young, require to be taught not to 

 attack poultry, sheep, and pigs ! No doubt they occasionally do 

 make an attack, and are then beaten ; and if not cured, they are 

 destroyed; so that habit and some degree of selection have pro- 

 bably concurred in civilising by inheritance our dogs. On the 

 •other hand, young chickens have lost, wholly by habit, that fear of 

 the dog and cat which no doubt was originally instinctive in them ; 

 for I am informed by Captain Hutton that the young chickens of 

 the parent-stock, the Gallus bankiva, when reared in India under a 

 hen, are at first excessively wild. So it is with young pheasants 

 reared in England under a hen. It is not that chickens have lost 

 all fear, but fear only of dogs and cats, for if the hen gives the 

 danger-chuckle, they will run (more especially young turkeys) from 

 under her, and conceal themselves in the surrounding grass or 

 thickets ; and this is evidently done for the instinctive purpose of 

 allowing, as we see in wild ground-birds, their mother to fly away. 

 But this instinct retained by our chickens has become useless under 

 domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the 

 power of flight. 



Hence, we may conclude, that under domestication instincts have 

 been acquired, and natural instincts have been lost, partly by habit, 

 and 'partly by man selecting and accumulating, during successive 

 generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first 

 appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident. In 

 some cases compulsory habit alone has sufficed to produce inhe- 



p 2 



