ke a clown trying to frighten a child. And now
a new horror has been added to the barn owl. The numerous letters which
appeared in _The Times_ and were summarised, with comments, by Sir T.
Digby Pigott, C.B., in _The Contemporary Review_ of July 1908, leave no
reasonable room for doubt that this bird sometimes becomes brightly
luminous, and is the will-o'-the-wisp for believing in which we are
deriding our forefathers. All things considered, I cannot withhold my
sympathy and some respect for the superstition of aged housekeepers,
Romans and Indians. For that of gamekeepers and farmers I have neither.
All our new schemes of "Nature study" will surely deserve the reproach
of futility if, in the next generation, every farmhouse in England has
not its own Owl Tower for the encouragement of this friend of man.

VIII

DOMESTIC ANIMALS

Long before Jubal became the father of all such as handle the harp and
the organ and Tubalcain the instructor of every artificer in brass and
iron, Abel was a keeper of sheep, but the sacred writer has not informed
us how he first caught them and tamed them. If we consult other records
of the infancy of the human race, they reveal as little. When the
Egyptians began to portray their daily life on stone 6,000 or 7,000
years ago, they already had cattle and sheep, geese and ducks and dogs
and plenty of asses, though not horses. They got these from the
Assyrians, who had used them in their chariots long before they began to
record anything.

Further back than this we have no one to question except those shadowy
men of the Stone Age who have left us heaps of their implements, but
none of their bones. They were not so careful of the bones of horses,
which lie in thousands about the precincts of their untidy villages, but
not a scrawl on a bit of a mammoth tusk has been found to indicate
whether these were ridden and driven, or only hunted and eaten.

Why should it be recorded that Cadmus invented letters? Why should we
inquire who first made gunpowder and glass? Why should every schoolboy
be taught that Watt was the inventor of the steam engine? Can any of
these be put in the scale, as benefactors of our race, with the man who
first trained a horse to carry him on its back, or drew milk with his
hands from the udders of a cow? The familiarity of the thing has made us
callous to the wonder of it. Let us put it before us, like a painting or
a statue, and have a good look at it.

There i