s. Those races which avail themselves
extensively of it in their dietary are the strongest and most enduring
the world has known. The Aryan folk are indeed characteristically
drinkers of milk and users of its products, cheese and butter. It may
well be that their power is in some measure due to this resource.

[Illustration: Winnowing Grain in Egypt]

In our horned cattle man won to domestication creatures which were
admirably suited to promote his advancement from savagery to
civilization. Indeed, the possession of these animals appears to have
been a prime condition of his advancement. With them, however, as with
the camel, there came little in the way of those sympathetic qualities
which have made it possible for our race to establish affectionate
relations with other captive forms. Long intercourse with man has, it
is true, somewhat diminished the wildness of these creatures, though
the males remain the most indomitably ferocious of all our
servants. The truth seems to be that the bovine animals have but
little intellectual capacity, and it has in no wise served the
purposes of man to develop such powers of mind as they have. We have
ever been given to asking little of them, save docility. This we have
in a high measure won with our milch cows, which of all our
domesticated creatures are perhaps the most absolutely submissive; the
more highly developed of them being little more than passive producers
of milk, almost without a trace of instincts or emotions except such
as pertain to reproduction and to feeding. It is a noteworthy fact
that in all the great literature of anecdote concerning our
domesticated animals, there is hardly a trace of stories which tend to
show the existence of sagacity in our common cattle.

It is evident that the variability of our domesticated bovines, as far
as their bodies are concerned, is very great. Between the ancient
aurochs and the more highly cultivated of its descendants, the
difference is as great as that which separates any other of our captive
animals from their wild ancestors. In size, shape, in flesh-and
milk-giving qualities, the departure from the old form of the wilderness
is remarkable. Moreover, at the present time these diverse breeds of
horned cattle are rapidly being multiplied, the distinctive forms
probably being twice as numerous as they were at the beginning of the
present century. The process of selection has led to some very wide
diversifications of the body.