accounts the most important.

Until men began to domesticate the forms of the wilderness, it was
impossible for them to rise above the grade of savages. Their supply of
food was necessarily in such a measure limited that their societies had
to remain small and they were given to much wandering to and fro over
the earth. Moreover, they had only the strength of their own hands for
all the work of life. It was not until our kind began to form a society
of other species about their homes that the foundations of civilizations
were firmly established. The home, indeed, may fairly be said to be the
product of the conditions which the process of domestication brought
about. As distinguished from the temporary hut of primitive men, it
represented the stability which was induced by the care of the plants
and animals which man had domiciled about him.

With every step upward in the organization of society we find that
the number and efficiency of these subjugated creatures increases.
Our American aborigines in their primitive state commanded only the
dog and three or four plants, yet with this scant help they had
already won beyond the lowest savagery and were at the threshold of
barbarism. In our more civilized societies of to-day we find the
products of near a hundred animals and about a thousand plants as
elements of commerce, and each year sees some gain in the number of
creatures which we make tributary to our desires.

So far as we can discern, the relations of primitive savages to the
animal life about them is on the whole more friendly than is that of
cultivated men. It is true that the savage looks to the creatures of
the wilderness for the greater part of his needs. He slays them, not
at all in sport, but for the profit they may afford. Moreover, in most
cases, his imagination endows these wild creatures with a spirit like
his own. He often adopts them, in his religious worship, placing his
tribe under the protection of one or another, as some of our own
people do themselves under the protection of particular saints. The
effect of domestication when man comes to have his own separate
estate in animal life is to separate men from the creatures of the
wilderness. "Wild" and "tame" come to be terms having a meaning which
the savage does not recognize, and this meaning has with the advance
of culture become intensified, until to most men the only creatures
entitled to protection are those which have been made subject to m