op of oxen grazing in a
forest, so long as he is able to see one of them, knows pretty
surely that they are all within reach. If oxen are frightened and
gallop off, they do not scatter, but remain in a single body. When
animals are not gregarious, they are to the herdsman like a falling
necklace of beads whose string is broken, or as a handful of water
escaping between the fingers.

The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is retained
by its extraordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which
it is reared.

An animal may be perfectly fitted to be a domestic animal, and be
peculiarly easy to tend in a general way, and yet the circumstances
in which the savages are living may make it too troublesome for them
to maintain a breed. The following account, taken from Mr. Scott
Nind's paper on the Natives of King George's Sound in Australia, and
printed in the first volume of the _Journal of the Geographical
Society_, is particularly to the point. He says:--

"In the chase the hunters are assisted by dogs, which they take when
young and domesticate; but they take little pains to train them to
any particular mode of hunting. After finding a litter of young, the
natives generally carry away one or two to rear; in this case, it
often occurs that the mother will trace and attack them; and, being
large and very strong, she is rather formidable. At some periods,
food is so scanty as to compel the dog to leave his master and
provide for himself; but in a few days he generally returns."

I have also evidence that this custom is common to the wild natives
of other parts of Australia.

The gregariousness of all our domestic species is, I think, the
primary reason why some of them are extinct in a wild state. The
wild herds would intermingle with the tame ones, some would become
absorbed, the others would be killed by hunters, who used the tame
cattle as a shelter to approach the wild. Besides this,
comfort-loving animals would be less suited to fight the battle of
life with the rest of the brute creation; and it is therefore to be
expected that those varieties which are best fitted for domestication,
would be the soonest extinguished in a wild state. For instance, we
could hardly fancy the camel to endure in a land where there were
large wild beasts.

_Selection_.--The irreclaimably wild members of every flock would
escape and be utterly lost; the wilder of those that remained would
assuredly be selected f