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He was behaving with much amiability, and trying in all ways at his command to get himself into easy domestication with his children entering into Mirah's music, showing himself docile about smoking, which Mrs. Adam could not tolerate in her parlor, and walking out in the square with his German pipe, and the tobacco with which Mirah supplied him.
He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus.
The more practical members of the primitive tribes were wont to club the patriarchs whom they regarded as having lived long enough; and an exaggerated spirit of economy led the sons of the forest to eat their venerable relatives. The domestication of the noble animal which is the symbol of Irish prosperity caused a remarkable change in primitive public opinion.
Hence, we may conclude that under domestication instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost, partly by habit and partly by man selecting and accumulating, during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident.
The speediness of this intellectual subjugation may be judged from the fact that, after a short term of domestication, they will take a willing and intelligent part in capturing their kindred of the wilderness, showing in this work little or no disposition to rejoin the wild herds. In the case of no other animal do we find anything like such an immediate adhesion to the ways of civilization.
VIII. If, then, memory depends on association, we should expect two corresponding phenomena in the case of plants and animals namely, that they should show a tendency to resume feral habits on being turned wild after several generations of domestication, and also that peculiarities should tend to show themselves at a corresponding age in the offspring and in the parents.
This, in fact, is the great bar to the domestication of animals. Between the sterility thus superinduced and that of hybrids, there are many points of similarity. In both cases the sterility is independent of general health, and is often accompanied by excess of size or great luxuriance.
If we turn to varieties, produced, or supposed to have been produced, under domestication, we are still involved in doubt.
There is a disease to which the horse, from his state of domestication, is frequently subject. The farriers have called it the grease. In this dairy country a great number of cows are kept, and the office of milking is performed indiscriminately by men and maid servants.
In his subsequent work, Animals and Plants under Domestication, Mr. Darwin still more clearly recognizes these causes of change in organization. A chapter is devoted to the subject.
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