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Inquiries into Human Faculty
rapidity with which they establish themselves in new lands. The goats and
hogs left on islands by the earlier navigators throve excellently on the
whole. The horse has taken possession of the Pampas, and the sheep and
ox of Australia. The dog is hardly repressible in the streets of an Oriental
town.
Fondness of Man.—Secondly, it must cling to man, notwithstanding
occasional hard usage and frequent neglect. If the animal had no natural
attachment to our species, it would fret itself to death, or escape and revert
to wildness. -It is easy to find cases where the partial or total non-
fulfilment of this condition is a corresponding obstacle to domestication.
Some kinds of cattle are too precious to be discarded, but very
troublesome to look after. Such are the reindeer to the Lapps. Mr.
Campbell of Islay informed me that the tamest of certain herds of them
look as if they were wild; they have to be caught with a lasso to be
milked. If they take fright, they are off to the hills; consequently the Lapps
are forced to accommodate themselves to the habits of their beasts, and to
follow them from snow to sea and from sea to snow at different seasons.
The North American reindeer has never been domesticated, owing, I
presume, to this cause. The Peruvian herdsmen would have had great
trouble to endure had the llama and alpaca not existed, for their cogeners,
the huanacu and the vicuna, are hardly to be domesticated.
Zebras, speaking broadly, are unmanageable. The Dutch Boers
constantly endeavour to break them to harness, and though they
occasionally succeed to a degree, the wild mulish nature of the animal is
always breaking out, and liable to balk them.
It is certain that some animals have naturally a greater fondness for
man than others; and as a proof of this, I will again quote Hearne about
the moose, who are considered by him to be the easiest to tame and
domesticate of any of the deer tribe. Formerly the closely-allied European
elks were domesticated in Sweden, and used to draw sledges, as they are
now occasionally in Canada; but they have been obsolete for many years.
Hearne says
“The young ones are so simple that I remember to have seen an Indian paddle his
canoe up to one of them, and take it by
