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It is a good mental exercise to try to fix the mind on the primitive man divested of all the attributes he has acquired in his struggles with the other mammalian fauna. The experiment is perfectly successful; only, at the end of it, you haven't any mind.
Versatile in its preying habits, its presence on the pampa is not surprising; but probably only an extreme abundance of large mammalian prey, which has not existed in recent times, could have, tempted an animal of the river and forest-loving habits of the jaguar to colonize this cold, treeless, and comparatively waterless desert. There are two other important cats.
The marsupial, it may be explained, is one of the mammalian order, which carries its young about in a pouch for a long time after they are born.
The present, then, was a year of low ebb. The first task was to determine whether this related to all mammalian life. Apparently not, because Deermice, Lynxes, Beaver, and Caribou were abundant. Yet these are not their maximum years; the accounts show them to have been so much more numerous last year.
Moreover, it requires a large amount of material to form a mammalian egg, such as that of the monotreme. It requires indefinitely more nutriment to build a mammal than a worm, for the former is not only larger and more perfect at birth; it is also vastly more complicated. The embryonic journey has, so to speak, lengthened out immensely.
Mind, not muscle, much less digestion or reproduction, is the goal of the animal kingdom. And we shall see later that the mammalian mode of reproduction and of care of the young led to an almost purely mental and moral advance. For these could have but one logical outcome, family life. And the family is the foundation of society.
What a distance there seems between such a tongue as this and your own little doorkeeper! But no wonder: we have now reached the confines of the kingdom of Mammalia, and the face of nature is beginning to change. The Armadillo, for instance, which comes next to the ant-eater, looks far more like the tortoise or lizard than its noble mammalian brethren.
I have now enumerated those characteristic structures of the horse which are of most importance for the purpose we have in view. To any one who is acquainted with the morphology of vertebrated animals, they show that the horse deviates widely from the general structure of mammals; and that the horse type is, in many respects, an extreme modification of the general mammalian plan.
In an economic sense it seems unlikely that any very great profit can be attained by the subjugation of any of the mammalian species which are still wild.
Thus in North America, where there was no domesticable beast of burden, the Indians, though an able folk, remain savages. So, too, in central and southern Africa, where the mammalian life, though rich, affords no large forms which tolerate captivity, the people have failed to attain any considerable culture.
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