40 
DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 
tive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and 
unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverish¬ 
ment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of 
the soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the neces- 
Horwegian bear and an Icelandic champion—dumb show on the part of 
Bruin, and chivalric words on that of Einnbogi—followed by a duel, in 
which the latter, who had thrown away his arms and armor in order that 
the combatants might meet on equal terms, was victorious. Drummond 
Hay’s very interesting work on Morocco contains many amusing notices 
of a similar feeling entertained by the Moors toward the redoubtable 
enemy of their flocks—the lion. 
This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all 
the domestic animals—if indeed they ever existed in a wild state—were 
appropriated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into 
organized and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant 
had acquired substantially its present artificial character, and that the 
properties of nearly all vegetable drugs and poisons were know r n at the 
remotest period to which historical records reach. Did nature bestow 
upon primitive man some instinct akin to that by which she teaches the 
brute to select the nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indis¬ 
criminately mixed in forest and pasture ? 
This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has 
been hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an 
original faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar 
to persons engaged in sheep husbandry in Hew England—and I have seen 
it confirmed by personal observation—that sheep bred where the common 
laurel, as it is called, Kalmia angustifolia , abounds, almost always avoid 
browsing upon the leaves of that plant, while those brought from districts 
where laurel is unknown, and turned into pastures where it grows, very 
often feed upon it and are poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hered¬ 
itary instinct, of a different character, may not improperly be noticed here. 
I refer to that by which horses bred in provinces where quicksands are 
common avoid their dangers or extricate themselves from them. See 
Bkemontier, Memoire sur les Dunes , Annales des Ponts et Chausse.es, 1833 : 
•premier semestre , pp. 155-157. 
It is commonly said in Hew England, and I believe with reason, that 
the crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows 
which were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plun¬ 
derers of the cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented 
for its protection. 
Civilization has added little to the number of vegetable or animal 
species grown in our fields or bred in our folds, while, on the contrary, 
