s a farmhouse, any common farmhouse, just one of the molecules
that constitute the mass of our wholesome country life. A horse is being
harnessed for the plough: its ancestors sniffed the wind on the steppes
of Tartary. Meek cows are standing to be milked: when primitive man
first knew them in their native forests he used to give them a wide
berth, for his flint arrows fell harmless off their tough hides, and
they were fierce exceedingly. A cock is crowing on the fence as if the
whole farm belonged to himself: he ought to be skulking in an Indian
jungle. The sheep have no business here; their place is on the rocky
mountains of Asia. As for the dog, it is difficult to assign it a
country, for it owns no wild kindred in any part of the world, but it
ought at least to be worrying the sheep. If there is an ass, it is a
native of Abyssinia, and the Turkeys are Americans. The cat derives its
descent from an Egyptian.

But all these are of one country now and of one religion. They know no
home nor desire any, except the farmhouse, in which they were born and
bred, and the lord of it is their lord, to whom they look for food and
protection. And what would he do without them? What should we do without
them? It is impossible to conceive that life could be carried on if we
were deprived of these obedient and uncomplaining servants. High
civilisation has been attained without steam engines; education, as we
use the term now, is superfluous--Runjeet Singh, the Lion of the Punjab,
could neither read nor write; the human race has prospered and
multiplied without the knowledge of iron; but we know of no time when
man did without domestic animals.

It is vain to speculate how the thing first came about, whether the
sportive anthropoid ape took to riding on a wild goat before he emerged
as a man keeping flocks, or whether some great pioneer, destined to be
worshipped in after ages as a demigod, showed his fellows how the wild
calves, if taken young, might be trained into tractable slaves; and it
is hopeless to expect that any record will now leap to light which will
give us knowledge in place of speculation. But it might not be
unprofitable to seek for some clue to the strange selection which the
domesticating genius of man has made from among the multifarious
material presented to it by the animal kingdom. If we do so we shall
almost be forced to the conclusion that domesticability is a character,
or quality, inherent in some animals a