, which is
reared exclusively by foster-mothers. It is probable that nearly
every young cuckoo, during a series of many hundred generations, has
been brought up in a family whose language is a chirp and a twitter.
But the cuckoo cannot or will not adopt that language, or any other
of the habits of its foster-parents. It leaves its birthplace as
soon as it is able, and finds out its own kith and kin, and
identifies itself henceforth with them. So utterly are its earliest
instructions in an alien bird-language neglected, and so completely
is its new education successful, that the note of the cuckoo tribe
is singularly correct.

DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS.[14]

[Footnote 14: This memoir is reprinted from the _Transactions of
the Ethnological Society_]

Before leaving the subject of Nature and Nurture, I would direct
attention to evidence bearing on the conditions under which animals
appear first to have been domesticated. It clearly shows the small
power of nurture against adverse natural tendencies.

The few animals that we now possess in a state of domestication were
first reclaimed from wildness in prehistoric times. Our remote
barbarian ancestors must be credited with having accomplished a very
remarkable feat, which no subsequent generation has rivalled. The
utmost that we of modern times have succeeded in doing, is to
improve the races of those animals that we received from our
forefathers in an already domesticated condition.

There are only two reasonable solutions of this exceedingly curious
fact. The one is, that men of highly original ideas, like the
mythical Prometheus, arose from time to time in the dawn of human
progress, and left their respective marks on the world by being the
first to subjugate the camel, the llama, the reindeer, the horse,
the ox, the sheep, the hog, the dog, or some other animal to the
service of man. The other hypothesis is that only a few species of
animals are fitted by their nature to become domestic, and that
these were discovered long ago through the exercise of no higher
intelligence than is to be found among barbarous tribes of the
present day. The failure of civilised man to add to the number of
domesticated species would on this supposition be due to the fact
that all the suitable material whence domestic animals could be
derived has been long since worked out.

I submit that the latter hypothesis is the true one for the reasons
about to be given; and if so, th