DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 
79 
and the chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the 
sheep; but while the wild animal does not appear to be a 
destructive agency in the garden of nature, his domestic con¬ 
geners are eminently so. This is partly from the change of 
habits resulting from domestication and association with man, 
partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is 
not determined by the natural relation of demand and spon¬ 
taneous supply which regulates the multiplication of wild 
creatures, but by the convenience of man, who is, in compara¬ 
tively few things, amenable to the control of the merely phys¬ 
ical arrangements of nature. When the domesticated animal 
escapes from human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the 
horse, the goat, and perhaps the ass—which, so far as I know, 
are the only well-authenticated instances of the complete 
emancipation of household quadrupeds—he becomes again an 
unresisting subject of nature, and all his economy is governed 
by the same laws as that of his fellows which have never been 
enslaved by man; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he 
is an auxiliary in the warfare his master is ever waging against 
all existences except those which he can tame to a willing 
servitude. 
Number of Quadrupeds in the United States. 
Civilization is so intimately associated with, if not depend¬ 
ent upon, certain inferior forms of animal life, that cultivated 
man has never failed to accompany himself, in all his migra¬ 
tions, with some of these humble attendants. The ox, the horse, 
the sheep, and even the comparatively useless dog and cat, as 
well as several species of poultry, are voluntarily transported 
by every emigrant colony, and they soon multiply to numbers 
very far exceeding those of the wild genera most nearly corre¬ 
sponding to them.* According to the census of the United 
* The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are pas¬ 
sengers by every ship that sails from Europe to a foreign port, and several 
species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their 
range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of 
Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist. Avg. Scriptores , ed. Casaubon, 
