d fields yield perhaps a hundred
times as many varieties of plants as they did in the earliest historic
agriculture. The advance in the process of domestication is not so rapid
as regards the animal kingdom as it is with the realm of plants, and
this mainly for the reason that animals have a will of their own which
has to be bent or broken to that of man. Still it goes on apace. We of
to-day have at our command many times the number of sentient species
contributive to our pleasure or profit that had been made captive at the
beginning of our era. Naturally, in the early days of domestication, men
brought under their control the greater number of the animals which gave
promise of utility. As no new species of any economic importance have
been created within the last geologic period, the field for the
extension of economic domestication has of late been very limited. But
the realm of sympathetic appreciation, unlike the economic, knows no
definite bounds, and promises in time to bring all the more important
organic forms under the care of the sympathetic and masterful being who
has been chosen as the ruler of terrestrial life.

We thus see that the matter of domesticated animals is but a part of the
larger problem which includes all that relates to man's destined mastery
of the earth--a mastery which he is rapidly winning. It means that, in
time, a large part of the life of this sphere is to be committed to his
care, to survive or perish as he wills, to change at his bidding, to
give, as other subjugated kinds have done, whatever of profit or
pleasure they may contribute to his endless advancement. From this point
of view our domesticated creatures should be presented to our people,
with the purpose in mind of bringing them to see that the process of
domestication has a far-reaching aspect, a dignity, we may fairly say a
grandeur, that few human actions possess. If we can impress this view,
it will be certain to awaken men to a larger sense of their
responsibility for, and their duty by, the creatures which we have taken
from their olden natural state into the social order. It will, at the
same time, enlarge our conceptions of our own place in the order of this
world.

In the following pages little effort has been made to present those
facts concerning domesticated animals which would commonly be reckoned
as scientific. The several essays which, in larger part, were separately
printed in Scribner's Magazine, are intended