48 galton.org
48
Inquiries into Human Faculty
animals possess a want of self-reliance in a marked degree;
that the
conditions of the lives of these animals have made a want of self-reliance
a necessity to them, and that by the law of natural selection the gregarious
instincts and their accompanying slavish aptitudes have gradually become
evolved. Then I shall argue that our remote ancestors. have lived under
parallel conditions, and that other causes peculiar to human society have
acted up to the present day in the same direction, and that we have
inherited the gregarious instincts and slavish aptitudes which have been
needed under past circumstances, although in our advancing civilisation
they are becoming of more harm than good to our race.
It was my fortune, in earlier life, to gain an intimate knowledge of
certain classes of gregarious animals. The urgent need of the camel for the
close companionship of his fellows was a never-exhausted topic of
curious admiration to me during tedious days of travel across many North
African deserts. I also happened to hear and read a great deal about the
still more marked gregarious instincts of the llama; but the social animal
into whose psychology I am conscious of having penetrated most
thoroughly is the ox of the wild parts of western South Africa. It is
necessary to insist upon the epithet “wild,” because an ox of tamed
parentage has different natural instincts; for instance, an English ox is far
less gregarious than those I am about to describe, and affords a
proportionately less valuable illustration to my argument. The oxen of
which I speak belonged to the Damaras, and none of the ancestry of these
cattle had ever been broken to harness. They were watched from a
distance during the day, as they roamed about the open country, and at
night they were driven with cries to enclosures, into which they rushed
much like a body of terrified wild animals driven by huntsmen into a trap.
Their scared temper was such as to make it impossible to lay hold of them
by other means than by driving the whole herd into a clump, and lassoing
the leg of the animal it was desired to seize, and throwing him to the
ground with dexterous force. With oxen and cows of this description,
whose nature is no doubt shared by the bulls, I spent more than a year in
the closest companionship.
