ANIMALS ALLIED WITH MAN. 
109 
DOMESTIC RUMINANTS. 
It is the most important family of mammifers, if not the richest 
in species, and the most useful to man by the numerous qualities 
of its spirit and its flesh. 
We must believe that the stars, whose concurrence has created 
it, have been little disturbed in their operations, for the series is 
almost complete, and we find groups of it under all latitudes ; the 
antelope, the giraffe, the zebra, under the torrid zone ; the rein- 
deer, in those frozen regions where the earth no longer lives. 
That maternal providence which watches over the destiny of 
globes, has known how to distribute the pieces of its precious fur- 
niture, so that each country, even the most disinherited, should 
have its own. This providence has given to the camel, together 
with sobriety and the instinct of divining springs, those large slip- 
per-like hoofs, which enable it to glide like a ship over the burn- 
ing billows of the desert ; it is this which has given the lightness 
of the bird to the chamois, the wild goat, the isard, to leap wild 
peaks, crested with the eternal snows. No family has furnished 
man wdth so many docile servants as that of the ruminants ; wit- 
ness the herd of oxen, of sheep, and of goats — the herd, first ele- 
ment of man’s prosperity — most interesting of his animal conquests. 
The ruminants have done for man in the order of quadrupeds 
wdiat the gallinacea have done in the order of birds, they have 
given to all beasts the example of submission to their legitimate 
king. Man knows not yet all the gratitude he owes to these two 
model races, some of which — those allied to him like the ox, the 
sheep, and the turkey — serve him, feed him, and dress him, while 
others rebellious— the roebuck, the pheasant, the quail — enter so 
largely into his feasts and into his pleasures as game. After fifty 
years of the harmonian order all the ruminants wall be ours ; the 
karibou of the north, and the elk and the bison of the grassy prai- 
ries of Western America, like the untamed buffalo of the forests of 
Abyssinia, and of the isles of the Sound. The domestic cow has 
already made praiseworthy attempts in the forests of Newfound- 
land to bring in the karibou. God has written kindness, quietude, 
innocence, in the eye of the ruminants, for God has willed that all 
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