390 
ON BREEDING. 
of form, they give us no mean idea of the primaeval grandeur of 
these animals, 
“ When stalk’d the bison from his shaggy lair, 
Thousands of years before the silent air 
Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen.” 
u Let us compare,’’ says Bufton, “ our pitiful sheep with the 
moujion, from which they derived their origin. The mouflon is a 
large animal: he is fleet as a stag, armed with horns and thick 
hoofs, covered with coarse hair, and dreads neither the incle¬ 
mency of the sky, nor the voracity of the wolf. He not only 
escapes from his enemies by the swiftness of his course, and 
scaling, with truly wonderful leaps, the most frightful precipices, 
but he resists them by the strength of his body and the solidity 
of the arms with which his head and feet are fortified. How dif¬ 
ferent from our sheep, which subsist with difficulty in flocks, 
and are unable to defend themselves by their numbers, and can¬ 
not endure the cold of our winters without shelter, and who 
would all perish, if man withdrew his protection ! In the warm 
climates of Asia and Africa, the mouflon, who is the common 
parent of all the races of this species, appears to be less dege¬ 
nerated than in any other region. Though reduced to a domestic 
state, he has preserved his stature and his hair; but the size of 
his horns is diminished.” 
In relation to man, certainly our sheep are much improved, 
but the change which they have undergone must only be consi¬ 
dered as degradation; for, with regard to Nature, improvement 
and degradation are the same thing. 
Having, in the preceding account, considered the different de¬ 
grees of intellect possessed by the different breeds of horses, we 
beg to remark, that we do not coincide with those* visionaries 
who ascribe to brutes high intellectual powers and moral virtues; 
who believed that they not only possessed rational principles, but 
an innate religion—a kind of daily adoration of the sun and 
moon :—that their natural operations are performed with a view 
to consequences; that they are enabled to take a review of the 
past, and to look forward with a penetrating eye to the future. 
This might very justly be called the march of intellect among 
brutes. We believe with Locke, that some of the inferior ani- 
mals have perceptions of particular truths, and, within very 
narrow limits, the faculty of reason ; “ for, if they have any ideas 
at all,” he says, “ and are not mere machines, as some would 
have them, we cannot deny them to have some reason. It 
* Pliny, ^Elian, Plutarch, and others of later date. 
