40 
a selection from them as may present the highest points of excel¬ 
lence, omitting the inferior kinds, and that the opportunity is 
afforded us of not only making the most valuable and beneficial 
application of acclimatisation principles possible anywhere, but that 
from the almost total absence in Australia of beasts of prey which 
everywhere else keep down the multiplication of such stock, we are 
visibly promised a blessing on our labour, beyond what could be 
found elsewhere ; the good we do will live after us, and the work 
of our hands will thrive and prosper to our hearts’ content, and so 
become a lasting benefit to the millions of men who will in the 
fulness of time inhabit this land. 
I must here notice a strangely erroneous remark which I find 
repeated in almost every treatise and speech on Acclimatisation, viz., 
that the necessity for Acclimatisation Societies was shown by the 
fact, that out of upwards of three hundrtt and forty-one gallinaceous 
birds, all good for food, man had only succeeded in domesticating 
eight or ten, and that four of these were domesticated before the 
Christian era, two thousand years having only added four or five to 
the number domesticated before ; and a somewhat similar small pro¬ 
portion of desirable quadrupeds, good for food, had been domesti¬ 
cated. Now, it is implied in this remark, that all the remainder of 
the useful birds and beasts might also be domesticated if we tried. 
But this shows an ignorance or forgetfulness of the very curious fact, 
that certain birds and beasts of the most highly-uscful kinds for the 
purposes of man, show a special aptitude for domestication, and a love 
of human society, obviously implanted in them as part of their origi¬ 
nal nature, and having no connexion whatever with their physical 
structure which could indicate that the benefit they conferred on 
man was mutual; for you find that those most nearly allied, pre¬ 
sent the utmost difference in this respect. Let us take, for ex¬ 
ample, two species of the genus Equtis, so nearly alike that if their 
skin was off, it would take a most skilful naturalist to tell one from 
the other. I allude to the ass and the zebra. The one, our patient 
servant, domesticated without an effort from the earliest times, and 
no longer known in the wild state ; while the other has resisted 
every attempt for centuries to tame it by force or kindness, with an 
innate stubborn “ viciousness,” as unthinking persons would call it, 
which even taught Mr. Barey to respect what I believe to be a na¬ 
tural law, by showing him that it could and would continue to kick 
as violently on three legs, as the man-loving horse or ass had ever 
done on four. Then, again, the wild cat of Europe is so like the 
tame one, that the chief distinguishing character is that which you 
