I received about eighty returns of cases of close similarity, thirty-five of which entered into many instructive details. In a few of these not a single point of difference could be specified. In the remainder, the colour of the hair and eyes were almost always identical; the height, weight, and strength were nearly so. Nevertheless, I have a few cases of a notable difference in height, weight, and strength, although the resemblance was otherwise very near. The manner and personal address of the thirty-five pairs of twins are usually described as very similar, but accompanied by a slight difference of expression, familiar to near relatives, though unperceived by strangers. The intonation of the voice when speaking is commonly the same, but it frequently happens that the twins sing in different keys. Most singularly, the one point in which similarity is rare is the handwriting. I cannot account for this, considering how strongly handwriting runs in families, but I am sure of the fact. I have only one case in which nobody, not even the twins themselves, could distinguish their own notes of lectures, etc.; barely two or three in which the handwriting was undistinguishable by others, and only a few in which it was described as closely alike. On the other hand, I have many in which it is stated to be unlike, and some in which it is alluded to as the only point of difference. It would appear that the handwriting is a very delicate test of difference in organisation—a conclusion which I commend to the notice of enthusiasts in the art of discovering character by the handwriting.

One of my inquiries was for anecdotes regarding mistakes made between the twins by their near relatives. The replies are numerous, but not very varied in character. When the twins are children, they are usually distinguished by ribbons tied round the wrist or neck; nevertheless the one is sometimes fed, physicked, and whipped by mistake for the other, and the description of these little domestic catastrophes was usually given by the mother, in a phraseology that is somewhat touching by reason of its seriousness. I have one case in which a doubt remains whether the children were not changed in their bath, and the presumed A is not really B, and vice versa. In another case, an artist was engaged on the portraits of twins who were between three and four years of age; he had to lay aside his work for three weeks, and, on resuming it, could not tell to which child the respective likenesses he had in hand belonged. The mistakes become less numerous on the part of the mother during the boyhood and girlhood of the twins, but are almost as frequent as before on the part of strangers. I have many instances of tutors being unable to distinguish their twin pupils. Two girls used regularly to impose on their music teacher when one of them wanted a whole holiday; they had their lessons at separate hours, and the one girl sacrificed herself to receive two lessons on the same day, while the other one enjoyed herself from morning to evening. Here is a brief and comprehensive account:—

"Exactly alike in all, their schoolmasters never could tell them apart; at dancing parties they constantly changed partners without discovery; their close resemblance is scarcely diminished by age."

The following is a typical schoolboy anecdote:—

"Two twins were fond of playing tricks, and complaints were frequently made; but the boys would never own which was the guilty one, and the complainants were never certain which of the two he was. One head master used to say he would never flog the innocent for the guilty, and another used to flog both."

No less than nine anecdotes have reached me of a twin seeing his or her reflection in a looking-glass, and addressing it in the belief it was the other twin in person.

I have many anecdotes of mistakes when the twins were nearly grown up. Thus:—

"Amusing scenes occurred at college when one twin came to visit the other; the porter on one occasion refusing to let the visitor out of the college gates, for, though they stood side by side, he professed ignorance as to which he ought to allow to depart."

Children are usually quick in distinguishing between their parent and his or her twin; but I have two cases to the contrary. Thus, the daughter of a twin says:—

"Such was the marvellous similarity of their features, voice, manner, etc., that I remember, as a child, being very much puzzled, and I think, had my aunt lived much with us, I should have ended by thinking I had two mothers."

In the other case, a father who was a twin, remarks of himself and his brother:—

"We were extremely alike, and are so at this moment, so much so that our children up to five and six years old did not know us apart."

I have four or five instances of doubt during an engagement of marriage. Thus:—

"A married first, but both twins met the lady together for the first time, and fell in love with her there and then. A managed to see her home and to gain her affection, though B went sometimes courting in his place, and neither the lady nor her parents could tell which was which."

I have also a German letter, written in quaint terms, about twin brothers who married sisters, but could not easily be distinguished by them.[13] In the well-known novel by Mr. Wilkie Collins of Poor Miss Finch, the blind girl distinguishes the twin she loves by the touch of his hand, which gives her a thrill that the touch of the other brother does not. Philosophers have not, I believe, as yet investigated the conditions of such thrills; but I have a case in which Miss Finch's test would have failed. Two persons, both friends of a certain twin lady, told me that she had frequently remarked to them that "kissing her twin sister was not like kissing her other sisters, but like kissing herself—her own hand, for example."

It would be an interesting experiment for twins who were closely alike to try how far dogs could distinguish them by scent.

[Footnote 13: I take this opportunity of withdrawing an anecdote, happily of no great importance, published in Men of Science, p. 14, about a man personating his twin brother for a joke at supper, and not being discovered by his wife. It was told me on good authority; but I have reason to doubt the fact, as the story is not known to the son of one of the twins. However, the twins in question were extraordinarily alike, and I have many anecdotes about them sent me by the latter gentleman.]

I have a few anecdotes of strange mistakes made between twins in adult life. Thus, an officer writes:—

"On one occasion when I returned from foreign service my father turned to me and said, 'I thought you were in London,' thinking I was my brother—yet he had not seen me for nearly four years—our resemblance was so great."

The next and last anecdote I shall give is, perhaps, the most remarkable of those I have; it was sent me by the brother of the twins, who were in middle life at the time of its occurrence:—

"A was again coming home from India, on leave; the ship did not arrive for some days after it was due; the twin brother B had come up from his quarters to receive A, and their old mother was very nervous. One morning A rushed in saying, 'Oh, mother, how are you?' Her answer was, 'No, B, it's a bad joke; you know how anxious I am!' and it was a little time before A could persuade her that he was the real man."

Enough has been said to prove that an extremely close personal resemblance frequently exists between twins of the same sex; and that, although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into manhood and womanhood, some cases occur in which the diminution of resemblance is hardly perceptible. It must be borne in mind that it is not necessary to ascribe the divergence of development, when it occurs, to the effect of different nurtures, but it is quite possible that it may be due to the late appearance of qualities inherited at birth, though dormant in early life, like gout. To this I shall recur.

There is a curious feature in the character of the resemblance between twins, which has been alluded to by a few correspondents; it is well illustrated by the following quotations. A mother of twins says:—

"There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression, that often gave to each the effect of being more like his brother than himself."

Again, two twin brothers, writing to me, after analysing their points of resemblance, which are close and numerous, and pointing out certain shades of difference, add—

"These seem to have marked us through life, though for a while, when we were first separated, the one to go to business, and the other to college, our respective characters were inverted; we both think that at that time we each ran into the character of the other. The proof of this consists in our own recollections, in our correspondence by letter, and in the views which we then took of matters in which we were interested."

In explanation of this apparent interchangeableness, we must recollect that no character is simple, and that in twins who strongly resemble each other, every expression in the one may be matched by a corresponding expression in the other, but it does not follow that the same expression should be the prevalent one in both cases. Now it is by their prevalent expressions that we should distinguish between the twins; consequently when one twin has temporarily the expression which is the prevalent one in his brother, he is apt to be mistaken for him. There are also cases where the development of the two twins is not strictly pari passu; they reach the same goal at the same time, but not by identical stages. Thus: A is born the larger, then B overtakes and surpasses A, and is in his turn overtaken by A, the end being that the twins, on reaching adult life, are of the same size. This process would aid in giving an interchangeable likeness at certain periods of their growth, and is undoubtedly due to nature more frequently than to nurture.

Among my thirty-five detailed cases of close similarity, there are no less than seven in which both twins suffered from some special ailment or had some exceptional peculiarity. One twin writes that she and her sister "have both the defect of not being able to come downstairs quickly, which, however, was not born with them, but came on at the age of twenty." Three pairs of twins have peculiarities in their fingers; in one case it consists in a slight congenital flexure of one of the joints of the little finger; it was inherited from a grandmother, but neither parents, nor brothers, nor sisters show the least trace of it. In another case the twins have a peculiar way of bending the fingers, and there was a faint tendency to the same peculiarity in the mother, but in her alone of all the family. In a third case, about which I made a few inquiries, which is given by Mr. Darwin, but is not included in my returns, there was no known family tendency to the peculiarity which was observed in the twins of having a crooked little finger. In another pair of twins, one was born ruptured, and the other became so at six months old. Two twins at the age of twenty-three were attacked by toothache, and the same tooth had to be extracted in each case. There are curious and close correspondences mentioned in the falling off of the hair. Two cases are mentioned of death from the same disease; one of which is very affecting. The outline of the story was that the twins were closely alike and singularly attached, and had identical tastes; they both obtained Government clerkships, and kept house together, when one sickened and died of Bright's disease, and the other also sickened of the same disease and died seven months later.

Both twins were apt to sicken at the same time in no less than nine out of the thirty-five cases. Either their illnesses, to which I refer, were non-contagious, or, if contagious, the twins caught them simultaneously; they did not catch them the one from the other. This implies so intimate a constitutional resemblance, that it is proper to give some quotations in evidence. Thus, the father of two twins says:—

"Their general health is closely alike; whenever one of them has an illness, the other invariably has the same within a day or two, and they usually recover in the same order. Such has been the case with whooping-cough, chicken-pox, and measles; also with slight bilious attacks, which they have successively. Latterly, they had a feverish attack at the same time."

Another parent of twins says:—

"If anything ails one of them, identical symptoms nearly always appear in the other; this has been singularly visible in two instances during the last two months. Thus, when in London, one fell ill with a violent attack of dysentery, and within twenty-four hours the other had precisely the same symptoms."

A medical man writes of twins with whom he is well acquainted:—

"Whilst I knew them, for a period of two years, there was not the slightest tendency towards a difference in body or mind; external influences seemed powerless to produce any dissimilarity."

The mother of two other twins, after describing how they were ill simultaneously up to the age of fifteen, adds, that they shed their first milk-teeth within a few hours of each other.

Trousseau has a very remarkable case (in the chapter on Asthma) in his important work Clinique M. edicale. (In the edition of 1873 it is in vol. ii. p. 473.) It was quoted at length in the original French, in Mr. Darwin's Variation under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 252. The following is a translation:—

"I attended twin brothers so extraordinarily alike, that it was impossible for me to tell which was which, without seeing them side by side. But their physical likeness extended still deeper, for they had, so to speak, a yet more remarkable pathological resemblance. Thus, one of them, whom I saw at the Neothermes at Paris, suffering from rheumatic ophthalmia, said to me, 'At this instant my brother must be having an ophthalmia like mine;' and, as I had exclaimed against such an assertion, he showed me a few days afterwards a letter just received by him from his brother, who was at that time at Vienna, and who expressed himself in these words—'I have my ophthalmia; you must be having yours.' However singular this story may appear, the fact is none the less exact; it has not been told to me by others, but I have seen it myself; and I have seen other analogous cases in my practice. These twins were also asthmatic, and asthmatic to a frightful degree. Though born in Marseilles, they were never able to stay in that town, where their business affairs required them to go, without having an attack. Still more strange, it was sufficient for them to get away only as far as Toulon in order to be cured of the attack caught at Marseilles. They travelled continually, and in all countries, on business affairs, and they remarked that certain localities were extremely hurtful to them, and that in others they were free from all asthmatic symptoms."

I do not like to pass over here a most dramatic tale in the Psychologie Morbide of Dr. J. Moreau (de Tours), M. edecin de l'Hospice de Bicetre. Paris, 1859, p. 172. He speaks "of two twin brothers who had been confined, on account of monomania, at Bicetre":—

"Physically the two young men are so nearly alike that the one is easily mistaken for the other. Morally, their resemblance is no less complete, and is most remarkable in its details. Thus, their dominant ideas are absolutely the same. They both consider themselves subject to imaginary persecutions; the same enemies have sworn their destruction, and employ the same means to effect it. Both have hallucinations of hearing. They are both of them melancholy and morose; they never address a word to anybody, and will hardly answer the questions that others address to them. They always keep apart, and never communicate with one another. An extremely curious fact which has been frequently noted by the superintendents of their section of the hospital, and by myself, is this: From time to time, at very irregular intervals of two, three, and many months, without appreciable cause, and by the purely spontaneous effect of their illness, a very marked change takes place in the condition of the two brothers. Both of them, at the same time, and often on the same day, rouse themselves from their habitual stupor and prostration; they make the same complaints, and they come of their own accord to the physician, with an urgent request to be liberated. I have seen this strange thing occur, even when they were some miles apart, the one being at Bicetre, and the other living at Saint-Anne."

I sent a copy of this passage to the principal authorities among the physicians to the insane in England, asking if they had ever witnessed any similar case. In reply, I have received three noteworthy instances, but none to be compared in their exact parallelism with that just given. The details of these three cases are painful, and it is not necessary to my general purpose that I should further allude to them.

There is another curious French case of insanity in twins, which was pointed out to me by Sir James Paget, described by Dr. Baume in the Annales M. edico-Psychologiques, 4 serie, vol. i., 1863, p. 312, of which the following is an abstract. The original contains a few more details, but is too long to quote: Francois and Martin, fifty years of age, worked as railroad contractors between Quimper and Chateaulin. Martin had twice slight attacks of insanity. On January 15 a box was robbed in which the twins had deposited their savings. On the night of January 23-24 both Francois (who lodged at Quimper) and Martin (who lived with his wife and children at St. Lorette, two leagues from Quimper) had the same dream at the same hour, three a.m., and both awoke with a violent start, calling out, "I have caught the thief! I have caught the thief! they are doing mischief to my brother!" They were both of them extremely agitated, and gave way to similar extravagances, dancing and leaping.

Martin sprang on his grandchild, declaring that he was the thief, and would have strangled him if he had not been prevented; he then became steadily worse, complained of violent pains in his head, went out of doors on some excuse, and tried to drown himself in the river Steir, but was forcibly stopped by his son, who had watched and followed him. He was then taken to an asylum by gendarmes, where he died in three hours. Francois, on his part, calmed down on the morning of the 24th, and employed the day in inquiring about the robbery. By a strange chance, he crossed his brother's path at the moment when the latter was struggling with the gendarmes; then he himself became maddened, giving way to extravagant gestures and using incoherent language (similar to that of his brother). He then asked to be bled, which was done, and afterwards, declaring himself to be better, went out on the pretext of executing some commission, but really to drown himself in the River Steir, which he actually did, at the very spot where Martin had attempted to do the same thing a few hours previously.

The next point which I shall mention in illustration of the extremely close resemblance between certain twins is the similarity in the association of their ideas. No less than eleven out of the thirty-five cases testify to this. They make the same remarks on the same occasion, begin singing the same song at the same moment, and so on; or one would commence a sentence, and the other would finish it. An observant friend graphically described to me the effect produced on her by two such twins whom she had met casually. She said: "Their teeth grew alike, they spoke alike and together, and said the same things, and seemed just like one person." One of the most curious anecdotes that I have received concerning this similarity of ideas was that one twin, A, who happened to be at a town in Scotland, bought a set of champagne glasses which caught his attention, as a surprise for his brother B; while, at the same time, B, being in England, bought a similar set of precisely the same pattern as a surprise for A. Other anecdotes of a like kind have reached me about these twins.

The last point to which I shall allude regards the tastes and dispositions of the thirty-five pairs of twins. In sixteen cases—that is, in nearly one-half of them—these were described as closely similar; in the remaining nineteen they were much alike, but subject to certain named differences. These differences belonged almost wholly to such groups of qualities as these: The one was the more vigorous, fearless, energetic; the other was gentle, clinging, and timid; or the one was more ardent, the other more calm and placid; or again, the one was the more independent, original, and self-contained; the other the more generous, hasty, and vivacious. In short, the difference was that of intensity or energy in one or other of its protean forms; it did not extend more deeply into the structure of the characters. The more vivacious might be subdued by ill health, until he assumed the character of the other; or the latter might be raised by excellent health to that of the former. The difference was in the key-note, not in the melody.

It follows from what has been said concerning the similar dispositions of the twins, the similarity in the associations of their ideas, of their special ailments, and of their illnesses generally, that the resemblances are not superficial, but extremely intimate. I have only two cases of a strong bodily resemblance being accompanied by mental diversity, and one case only of the converse kind. It must be remembered that the conditions which govern extreme likeness between twins are not the same as those between ordinary brothers and sisters, and that it would be incorrect to conclude from what has just been said about the twins that mental and bodily likeness are invariably co-ordinate, such being by no means the case.

We are now in a position to understand that the phrase "close similarity" is no exaggeration, and to realise the value of the evidence I am about to adduce. Here are thirty-five cases of twins who were "closely alike" in body and mind when they were young, and who have been reared exactly alike up to their early manhood and womanhood. Since then the conditions of their lives have changed; what change of Nurture has produced the most variation?

It was with no little interest that I searched the records of the thirty-five cases for an answer; and they gave an answer that was not altogether direct, but it was distinct, and not at all what I had expected. They showed me that in some cases the resemblance of body and mind had continued unaltered up to old age, notwithstanding very different conditions of life; and they showed in the other cases that the parents ascribed such dissimilarity as there was, wholly or almost wholly to some form of illness. In four cases it was scarlet fever; in a fifth, typhus; in a sixth, a slight effect was ascribed to a nervous fever; in a seventh it was the effect of an Indian climate; in an eighth, an illness (unnamed) of nine months' duration; in a ninth, varicose veins; in a tenth, a bad fracture of the leg, which prevented all active exercise afterwards; and there were three additional instances of undefined forms of ill health. It will be sufficient to quote one of the returns; in this the father writes:

"At birth they were exactly alike, except that one was born with a bad varicose affection, the effect of which had been to prevent any violent exercise, such as dancing or running, and, as she has grown older, to make her more serious and thoughtful. Had it not been for this infirmity, I think the two would have been as exactly alike as it is possible for two women to be, both mentally and physically; even now they are constantly mistaken for one another."

In only a very few cases is some allusion made to the dissimilarity being partly due to the combined action of many small influences, and in none of the thirty-five cases is it largely, much less wholly, ascribed to that cause. In not a single instance have I met with a word about the growing dissimilarity being due to the action of the firm free-will of one or both of the twins, which had triumphed over natural tendencies; and yet a large proportion of my correspondents happen to be clergymen, whose bent of mind is opposed, as I feel assured from the tone of their letters, to a necessitarian view of life.

It has been remarked that a growing diversity between twins may be ascribed to the tardy development of naturally diverse qualities; but we have a right, upon the evidence I have received, to go farther than this. We have seen that a few twins retain their close resemblance through life; in other words, instances do exist of an apparently thorough similarity of nature, in which such difference of external circumstances as may be consistent with the ordinary conditions of the same social rank and country do not create dissimilarity. Positive evidence, such as this, cannot be outweighed by any amount of negative evidence. Therefore, in those cases where there is a growing diversity, and where no external cause can be assigned either by the twins themselves or by their family for it, we may feel sure that it must be chiefly or altogether due to a want of thorough similarity in their nature. Nay, further, in some cases it is distinctly affirmed that the growing dissimilarity can be accounted for in no other way. We may, therefore, broadly conclude that the only circumstance, within the range of those by which persons of similar conditions of life are affected, that is capable of producing a marked effect on the character of adults, is illness or some accident which causes physical infirmity. The twins who closely resembled each other in childhood and early youth, and were reared under not very dissimilar conditions, either grow unlike through the development of natural characteristics which had lain dormant at first, or else they continue their lives, keeping time like two watches, hardly to be thrown out of accord except by some physical jar. Nature is far stronger than Nurture within the limited range that I have been careful to assign to the latter.

The effect of illness, as shown by these replies, is great, and well deserves further consideration. It appears that the constitution of youth is not so elastic as we are apt to think, but that an attack, say of scarlet fever, leaves a permanent mark, easily to be measured by the present method of comparison. This recalls an impression made strongly on my mind several years ago, by the sight of some curves drawn by a mathematical friend. He took monthly measurements of the circumference of his children's heads during the first few years of their lives, and he laid down the successive measurements on the successive lines of a piece of ruled paper, by taking the edge of the paper as a base. He then joined the free ends of the lines, and so obtained a curve of growth. These curves had, on the whole, that regularity of sweep that might have been expected, but each of them showed occasional halts, like the landing-places on a long flight of stairs. The development had been arrested by something, and was not made up for by after growth. Now, on the same piece of paper my friend had also registered the various infantile illnesses of the children, and corresponding to each illness was one of these halts. There remained no doubt in my mind that, if these illnesses had been warded off, the development of the children would have been increased by almost the precise amount lost in these halts. In other words, the disease had drawn largely upon the capital, and not only on the income, of their constitutions. I hope these remarks may induce some men of science to repeat similar experiments on their children of the future. They may compress two years of a child's history on one side of a ruled half-sheet of foolscap paper, if they cause each successive line to stand for a successive month, beginning from the birth of the child; and if they economise space by laying, not the 0-inch division of the tape against the edge of the pages, but, say, the 10-inch division.

The steady and pitiless march of the hidden weaknesses in our constitutions, through illness to death, is painfully revealed by these histories of twins. We are too apt to look upon illness and death as capricious events, and there are some who ascribe them to the direct effect of supernatural interference, whereas the fact of the maladies of two twins being continually alike shows that illness and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of constitutional changes beginning at birth, and upon which external circumstances have, on the whole, very small effect. In cases where the maladies of the twins are continually alike, the clocks of their two lives move regularly on at the same rate, governed by their internal mechanism. When the hands approach the hour, there are sudden clicks, followed by a whirring of wheels; the moment that they touch it, the strokes fall. Necessitarians may derive new arguments from the life-histories of twins.

We will now consider the converse side of our subject, which appears to me even the more important of the two. Hitherto we have investigated cases where the similarity at first was close, but afterwards became less; now we will examine those in which there was great dissimilarity at first, and will see how far an identity of nurture in childhood and youth tended to assimilate them. As has been already mentioned, there is a large proportion of cases of sharply-contrasted characteristics, both of body and mind, among twins. I have twenty such cases, given with much detail. It is a fact that extreme dissimilarity, such as existed between Esau and Jacob, is a no less marked peculiarity in twins of the same sex than extreme similarity. On this curious point, and on much else in the history of twins, I have many remarks to make, but this is not the place to make them.

The evidence given by the twenty cases above mentioned is absolutely accordant, so that the character of the whole may be exactly conveyed by a few quotations.

(1.) One parent says:—"They have had exactly the same nurture from their birth up to the present time; they are both perfectly healthy and strong, yet they are otherwise as dissimilar as two boys could be, physically, mentally, and in their emotional nature."

(2.) "I can answer most decidedly that the twins have been perfectly dissimilar in character, habits, and likeness from the moment of their birth to the present time, though they were nursed by the same woman, went to school together, and were never separated till the age of fifteen."

(3.) "They have never been separated, never the least differently treated in food, clothing, or education; both teethed at the same time, both had measles, whooping-cough, and scarlatina at the same time, and neither had had any other serious illness. Both are and have been exceedingly healthy, and have good abilities, yet they differ as much from each other in mental cast as any one of my family differs from another."

(4.) "Very dissimilar in body and mind: the one is quiet, retiring, and slow but sure; good-tempered, but disposed to be sulky when provoked;—the other is quick, vivacious, forward, acquiring easily and forgetting soon; quick-tempered and choleric, but quickly forgiving and forgetting. They have been educated together and never separated."

(5.) "They were never alike either in body or mind, and their dissimilarity increases daily. The external influences have been identical; they have never been separated."

(6.) "The two sisters are very different in ability and disposition. The one is retiring, but firm and determined; she has no taste for music or drawing. The other is of an active, excitable temperament: she displays an unusual amount of quickness and talent, and is passionately fond of music and drawing. From infancy, they have been rarely separated even at school, and as children visiting their friends, they always went together."

(7.) "They have been treated exactly alike both were brought up by hand; they have been under the same nurse and governess from their birth, and they are very fond of each other. Their increasing dissimilarity must be ascribed to a natural difference of mind and character, as there has been nothing in their treatment to account for it."

(8.) "They are as different as possible. [A minute and unsparing analysis of the characters of the two twins is given by their father, most instructive to read, but impossible to publish without the certainty of wounding the feelings of one of the twins, if these pages should chance to fall under his eyes.] They were brought up entirely by hand, that is, on cow's milk, and treated by one nurse in precisely the same manner."

(9.) "The home-training and influence were precisely the same, and therefore I consider the dissimilarity to be accounted for almost entirely by innate disposition and by causes over which we have no control."

(10.) "This case is, I should think, somewhat remarkable for dissimilarity in physique as well as for strong contrast in character. They have been unlike in body and mind throughout their lives. Both were reared in a country house, and both were at the same schools till aet. 16."

(11.) "Singularly unlike in body and mind from babyhood; in looks, dispositions, and tastes they are quite different. I think I may say the dissimilarity was innate, and developed more by time than circumstance."

(12.) "We were never in the least degree alike. I should say my sister's and my own character are diametrically opposed, and have been utterly different from our birth, though a very strong affection subsists between us."

(13.) The father remarks:—"They were curiously different in body and mind from their birth."

The surviving twin (a senior wrangler of Cambridge) adds:—"A fact struck all our school contemporaries, that my brother and I were complementary, so to speak, in point of ability and disposition. He was contemplative, poetical, and literary to a remarkable degree, showing great power in that line. I was practical, mathematical, and linguistic. Between us we should have made a very decent sort of a man."

I could quote others just as strong as these, in some of which the above phrase "complementary" also appears, while I have not a single case in which my correspondents speak of originally dissimilar characters having become assimilated through identity of nurture. However, a somewhat exaggerated estimate of dissimilarity may be due to the tendency of relatives to dwell unconsciously on distinctive peculiarities, and to disregard the far more numerous points of likeness that would first attract the notice of a stranger. Thus in case 11 I find the remark, "Strangers see a strong likeness between them, but none who knows them well can perceive it." Instances are common of slight acquaintances mistaking members, and especially daughters of a family, for one another, between whom intimate friends can barely discover a resemblance. Still, making reasonable allowance for unintentional exaggeration, the impression that all this evidence leaves on the mind is one of some wonder whether nurture can do anything at all, beyond giving instruction and professional training. It emphatically corroborates and goes far beyond the conclusions to which we had already been driven by the cases of similarity. In those, the causes of divergence began to act about the period of adult life, when the characters had become somewhat fixed; but here the causes conducive to assimilation began to act from the earliest moment of the existence of the twins, when the disposition was most pliant, and they were continuous until the period of adult life. There is no escape from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons of the same rank of society and in the same country. My fear is, that my evidence may seem to prove too much, and be discredited on that account, as it appears contrary to all experience that nurture should go for so little. But experience is often fallacious in ascribing great effects to trifling circumstances. Many a person has amused himself with throwing bits of stick into a tiny brook and watching their progress; how they are arrested, first by one chance obstacle, then by another; and again, how their onward course is facilitated by a combination of circumstances. He might ascribe much importance to each of these events, and think how largely the destiny of the stick had been governed by a series of trifling accidents. Nevertheless all the sticks succeed in passing down the current, and in the long-run, they travel at nearly the same rate. So it is with life, in respect to the several accidents which seem to have had a great effect upon our careers. The one element, that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency; it corresponds to the current in the stream, and inevitably asserts itself.

Much stress is laid on the persistence of moral impressions made in childhood, and the conclusion is drawn, that the effects of early teaching must be important in a corresponding degree. I acknowledge the fact, so far as has been explained in the chapter on Early Sentiments, but there is a considerable set-off on the other side. Those teachings that conform to the natural aptitudes of the child leave much more enduring marks than others. Now both the teachings and the natural aptitudes of the child are usually derived from its parents. They are able to understand the ways of one another more intimately than is possible to persons not of the same blood, and the child instinctively assimilates the habits and ways of thought of its parents. Its disposition is "educated" by them, in the true sense of the word; that is to say, it is evoked, not formed by them. On these grounds I ascribe the persistence of many habits that date from early home education, to the peculiarities of the instructors rather than to the period when the instruction was given. The marks left on the memory by the instructions of a foster-mother are soon sponged clean away. Consider the history of the cuckoo, 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, the finality of the process of domestication must be accepted as one of the most striking instances of the inflexibility of natural disposition, and of the limitations thereby imposed upon the [15] choice of careers for animals, and by analogy for those of men.

[Footnote 15: Transactionsof the Ethnological Society, 1865, with an alteration in the opening and concluding paragraphs, and with a few verbal emendations. If I had discussed the subject now for the first time I should have given extracts from the and with a few verbal emendations. If I had discussed the subject now for the first time I should have given extracts from the works of the travellers of the day, but it seemed needless to reopen the inquiry merely to give it a more modern air. I have also preferred to let the chapter stand as it was written, because considerable portions of it have been quoted by various authors (e.g. Bagehot, Economic Studies, pp. 161 to 166: Longman, 1880), and the original memoir is not easily accessible.]

My argument will be this:—All savages maintain pet animals, many tribes have sacred ones, and kings of ancient states have imported captive animals on a vast scale, for purposes of show, from neighbouring countries. I infer that every animal, of any pretensions, has been tamed over and over again, and has had numerous opportunities of becoming domesticated. But the cases are rare in which these opportunities have led to any result. No animal is fitted for domestication unless it fulfils certain stringent conditions, which I will endeavour to state and to discuss. My conclusion is, that all domesticable animals of any note have long ago fallen under the yoke of man. In short, that the animal creation has been pretty thoroughly, though half unconsciously, explored, by the every-day habits of rude races and simple civilisations.

It is a fact familiar to all travellers, that savages frequently capture young animals of various kinds, and rear them as favourites, and sell or present them as curiosities. Human nature is generally akin: savages may be brutal, but they are not on that account devoid of our taste for taming and caressing young animals; nay, it is not improbable that some races may possess it in a more marked degree than ourselves, because it is a childish taste with us; and the motives of an adult barbarian are very similar to those of a civilised child.

In proving this assertion, I feel embarrassed with the multiplicity of my facts. I have only space to submit a few typical instances, and must, therefore, beg it will be borne in mind that the following list could be largely reinforced. Yet even if I inserted all I have thus far been able to collect, I believe insufficient justice would be done to the real truth of the case. Captive animals do not commonly fall within the observation of travellers, who mostly confine themselves to their own encampments, and abstain from entering the dirty dwellings of the natives; neither do the majority of travellers think tamed animals worthy of detailed mention. Consequently the anecdotes of their existence are scattered sparingly among a large number of volumes. It is when those travellers are questioned who have lived long and intimately with savage tribes that the plenitude of available instances becomes most apparent.

I proceed to give anecdotes of animals being tamed in various parts of the world, at dates when they were severally beyond the reach of civilised influences, and where, therefore, the pleasure taken by the natives in taming them must be ascribed to their unassisted mother-wit. It will be inferred that the same rude races who were observed to be capable of great fondness towards animals in particular instances, would not unfrequently show it in others.

[North America.]—The traveller Hearne, who wrote towards the end of the last century, relates the following story of moose or elks in the more northern parts of North America. He says:—

"I have repeatedly seen moose at Churchill as tame as sheep and even more so.... The same Indian that brought them to the Factory had, in the year 1770, two others so tame that when on his passage to Prince of Wales's Fort in a canoe, the moose always followed him along the bank of the river; and at night, or on any other occasion when the Indians landed, the young moose generally came and fondled on them, as the most domestic animal would have done, and never offered to stray from the tents."

Sir John Richardson, in an obliging answer to my inquiries about the Indians of North America, after mentioning the bison calves, wolves, and other animals that they frequently capture and keep, said:—

"It is not unusual, I have heard, for the Indians to bring up young bears, the women giving them milk from their own breasts."

He mentions that he himself purchased a young bear, and adds:—

"The red races are fond of pets and treat them kindly; and in purchasing them there is always the unwillingness of the women and children to overcome, rather than any dispute about price. My young bear used to rob the women of the berries, they had gathered, but the loss was borne with good nature."

I will again quote Hearne, who is unsurpassed for his minute and accurate narratives of social scenes among the Indians and Esquimaux. In speaking of wolves he says:—

"They always burrow underground to bring forth their young, and though it is natural to suppose them very fierce at those times, yet I have frequently seen the Indians go to their dens and take out the young ones and play with them. I never knew a Northern Indian hurt one of them; on the contrary, they always put them carefully into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young wolves with vermilion or red ochre."

[South America.]—Ulloa, an ancient traveller, says:—

"Though the Indian women breed fowl and other domestic animals in their cottages, they never eat them: and even conceive such a fondness for them, that they will not sell them, much less kill them with their own hands. So that if a stranger who is obliged to pass the night in one of their cottages, offers ever so much money for a fowl, they refuse to part with it, and he finds himself under the necessity of killing the fowl himself. At this his landlady shrieks, dissolves into tears, and wrings her hands, as if it had been an only son, till seeing the mischief past mending, she wipes her eyes and quietly takes what the traveller offers her."

The care of the South American Indians, as Quiloa truly states, is by no means confined to fowls. Mr. Bates, the distinguished traveller and naturalist of the Amazons, has favoured me with a list of twenty-two species of quadrupeds that he has found tame in the encampments of the tribes of that valley. It includes the tapir, the agouti, the guinea-pig, and the peccari. He has also noted five species of quadrupeds that were in captivity, but not tamed. These include the jaguar, the great ant-eater, and the armadillo. His list of tamed birds is still more extensive.

[North Africa.]—The ancient Egyptians had a positive passion for tamed animals, such as antelopes, monkeys, crocodiles, panthers, and hyenas. Mr. Goodwin, the eminent Egyptologist, informed me that "they anticipated our zoological tastes completely," and that some of the pictures referring to tamed animals are among their very earliest monuments, viz. 2000 or 3000 years B.C. Mr. Mansfield Parkyns, who passed many years in Abyssinia and the countries of the Upper Nile, writes me word in answer to my inquiries;—

"I am sure that negroes often capture and keep alive wild animals. I have bought them and received them as presents—wild cats, jackals, panthers, the wild dog, the two best lions now in the Zoological Gardens, monkeys innumerable and of all sorts, and mongoose. I cannot say that I distinctly recollect any pets among the lowest orders of men that I met with, such as the Denkas, but I am sure they exist, and in this way. When I was on the White Nile and at Khartoum, very few merchants went up the White Nile; none had stations. They were little known to the natives; but none returned without some live animal or bird which they had procured from them. While I was at Khartoum, there came an Italian wild beast showman, after the Wombwell style. He made a tour of the towns up to Doul and Fazogly, Kordofan and the peninsula, and collected a large number of animals. Thus my opinion distinctly is, that negroes do keep wild animals alive. I am sure of it; though I can only vaguely recollect them in one or two cases. I remember some chief in Abyssinia who had a pet lion which he used to tease, and I have often seen monkeys about huts."

[Equatorial Africa.]—The most remarkable instance I have met with in modern Africa is the account of a menagerie that existed up to the beginning of the reign of the present king of the Wahumas, on the shores of Lake Nyanza. Suna, the great despot of that country, reigned till 1857. Captains Burton and Speke were in the neighbourhood in the following year, and Captain Burton thus describes (Journal R. G. Soc., xxix. 282) the report he received of Suna's collection:—

"He had a large menagerie of lions, elephants, leopards, and similar beasts of disport; he also kept for amusement fifteen or sixteen albinos; and so greedy was he of novelty, that even a cock of peculiar form or colour would have been forwarded by its owner to feed his eyes."

Captain Speke, in his subsequent journey to the Nile, passed many months at Uganda, as the guest of Suna's youthful successor, M'tese. The fame of the old menagerie was fresh when Captain Speke was there. He wrote to me as follows concerning it:—

"I was told Suna kept buffaloes, antelopes, and animals of all colours' (meaning 'sorts'), and in equal quantities. M'tese, his son, no sooner came to the throne, than he indulged in shooting them down before his admiring wives, and now he has only one buffalo and a few parrots left."

In Kouka, near Lake Tchad, antelopes and ostriches are both kept tame, as I was informed by Dr. Barth.

[South Africa.]—The instances are very numerous in South Africa where the Boers and half-castes amuse themselves with rearing zebras, antelopes, and the like; but I have not found many instances among the native races. Those that are best known to us are mostly nomad and in a chronic state of hunger, and therefore disinclined to nurture captured animals as pets; nevertheless, some instances can be adduced. Livingstone alludes to an extreme fondness for small tame singing-birds (pp. 324 and 453). Dr. (now Sir John) Kirk, who accompanied him in later years, mentions guinea-fowl—that do not breed in confinement, and are merely kept as pets—in the Shire valley, and Mr. Oswell has furnished me with one similar anecdote. I feel, however, satisfied that abundant instances could be found if properly sought for. It was the frequency with which I recollect to have heard of tamed animals when I myself was in South Africa, though I never witnessed any instance, that first suggested to me the arguments of the present paper. Sir John Kirk informs me that:

"As you approach the coast or Portuguese settlements, pets of all kinds become very common; but then the opportunity of occasionally selling them to advantage may help to increase the number; still, the more settled life has much to do with it."

In confirmation of this view, I will quote an early writer, Pigafetta (Hakluyt Coll., ii. 562), on the South African kingdom of Congo, who found a strange medley of animals in captivity, long before the demands of semi-civilisation had begun to prompt their collection:—

The King of Congo, on being Christianised by the Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century, "signified that whoever had any idols should deliver them to the lieutenants of the country. And within less than a month all the idols which they worshipped were brought into court, and certainly the number of these toys was infinite, for every man adored what he liked without any measure or reason at all. Some kept serpents of horrible figures, some worshipped the greatest goats they could get, some leopards, and others monstrous creatures. Some held in veneration certain unclean fowls, etc. Neither did they content themselves with worshipping the said creatures when alive, but also adored the very skins of them when they were dead and stuffed with straw."

[Australia.]—Mr. Woodfield records the following touching anecdote in a paper communicated to the Ethnological Society, as occurring in an unsettled part of West Australia, where the natives rank as the lowest race upon the earth:—

"During the summer of 1858-9 the Murchison river was visited by great numbers of kites, the native country of these birds being Shark's Bay. As other birds were scarce, we shot many of these kites, merely for the sake of practice, the natives eagerly devouring them as fast as they were killed. One day a man and woman, natives of Shark's Bay, came to the Murchison, and the woman immediately recognising the birds as coming from her country, assured us that the natives there never kill them, and that they are so tame that they will perch on the shoulders of the women and eat from their hands. On seeing one shot she wept bitterly, and not even the offer of the bird could assuage her grief, for she absolutely refused to eat it. No more kites were shot while she remained among us."

The Australian women habitually feed the puppies they intend to rear from their own breasts, and show an affection to them equal, if not exceeding, that to their own infants. Sir Charles Nicholson informs me that he has known an extraordinary passion for cats to be demonstrated by Australian women at Fort Phillip.

[New Guinea Group.]—Captain Develyn is reported (Bennett, Naturalist in Australia, p. 244) to say of the island of New Britain, near Australia, that the natives consider cassowaries "to a certain degree sacred, and rear them as pets. They carry them in their arms, and entertain a great affection for them."

Professor Huxley informs me that he has seen sucking-pigs nursed at the breasts of women, apparently as pets, in islands of the New Guinea Group.

[Polynesia.]—The savage and cannibal Fijians were no exceptions to the general rule, for Dr. Seemann wrote me word that they make pets of the flying fox (bat), the lizard, and parroquet. Captain Wilkes, in his exploring expedition (ii. 122), says the pigeon in the Samoon islands "is commonly kept as a plaything, and particularly by the chiefs. One of our officers unfortunately on one occasion shot a pigeon, which caused great commotion, for the bird was a king pigeon, and to kill it was thought as great a crime as to take the life of a man."

Mr. Ellis, writing of these islands (Polynesian Researches, ii. 285), says:—

"Eels are great favourites, and are tamed and fed till they attain an enormous size. Taoarii had several in different parts of the island. These pets were kept in large holes, two or three feet deep, partially filled with water. I have been several times with the young chief, when he has sat down by the side of the hole, and by giving a shrill sort of whistle, has brought out an enormous eel, which has moved about the surface of the water and eaten with confidence out of his master's hand."

[Syria.]—I will conclude this branch of my argument by quoting the most ancient allusion to a pet that I can discover in writing, though some of the Egyptian pictured representations are considerably older. It is the parable spoken by the Prophet Samuel to King David, that is expressed in the following words:—

"The poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was to him as a daughter."

We will now turn to the next stage of our argument. Not only do savages rear animals as pets, but communities maintain them as sacred. The ox of India and the brute gods of Egypt occur to us at once; the same superstition prevails widely. The quotation already given from Pigafetta is in point; the fact is too well known to readers of travel to make it necessary to devote space to its proof. I will therefore simply give a graphic account, written by M. Jules Gerard, of Whydah in West Africa:—

"I visited the Temple of Serpents in this town, where thirty of these monstrous deities were asleep in various attitudes. Each day at sunset, a priest brings them a certain number of sheep, goats, fowls, etc., which are slaughtered in the temple and then divided among the 'gods.' Subsequently during the night they (? the priests) spread themselves about the town, entering the houses in various quarters in search of further offerings. It is forbidden under penalty of death to kill, wound, or even strike one of these sacred serpents, or any other of the same species, and only the priests possess the privilege of taking hold of them, for the purpose of reinstating them in the temple should they be found elsewhere."

It would be tedious and unnecessary to adduce more instances of wild animals being nurtured in the encampments of savages, either as pets or as sacred animals. It will be found on inquiry that few travellers have failed altogether to observe them. If we consider the small number of encampments they severally visited in their line of march, compared with the vast number that are spread over the whole area, which is or has been inhabited by rude races, we may obtain some idea of the thousands of places at which half-unconscious attempts at domestication are being made in each year. These thousands must themselves be multiplied many thousandfold, if we endeavour to calculate the number of similar attempts that have been made since men like ourselves began to inhabit the world.

My argument, strong as it is, admits of being considerably strengthened by the following consideration:—

The natural inclination of barbarians is often powerfully reinforced by an enormous demand for captured live animals on the part of their more civilised neighbours. A desire to create vast hunting-grounds and menageries and amphitheatrical shows, seems naturally to occur to the monarchs who preside over early civilisations, and travellers continually remark that, whenever there is a market for live animals, savages will supply them in any quantities. The means they employ to catch game for their daily food readily admits of their taking them alive. Pit-falls, stake-nets, and springes do not kill. If the savage captures an animal unhurt, and can make more by selling it alive than dead, he will doubtless do so. He is well fitted by education to keep a wild animal in captivity. His mode of pursuing game requires a more intimate knowledge of the habits of beasts than is ever acquired by sportsmen who use more perfect weapons. A savage is obliged to steal upon his game, and to watch like a jackal for the leavings of large beasts of prey. His own mode of life is akin to that of the creatures he hunts. Consequently, the savage is a good gamekeeper; captured animals thrive in his charge, and he finds it remunerative to take them a long way to market. The demands of ancient Rome appear to have penetrated Northern Africa as far or farther than the steps of our modern explorers. The chief centres of import of wild animals were Egypt, Assyria (and other Eastern monarchies), Rome, Mexico, and Peru. I have not yet been able to learn what were the habits of Hindostan or China. The modern menagerie of Lucknow is the only considerable native effort in those parts with which I am acquainted.

[Egypt.]—The mutilated statistical tablet of Karnak (Trans. R. Soc. Lit., 1847, p. 369, and 1863, p. 65) refers to an armed invasion of Armenia by Thothmes III., and the payment of a large tribute of antelopes and birds. When Ptolemy Philadelphus feted the Alexandrians (Athenoeus, v.), the Ethiopians brought dogs, buffaloes, bears, leopards, lynxes, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros. Doubtless this description of gifts was common. Live beasts are the one article of curiosity and amusement that barbarians can offer to civilised nations.

[Assyria.]—Mr. Fox Talbot thus translates (Journal Asiatic Soc., xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal found in Nineveh and now in the British Museum:—

"He caught in hunter's toils (a blank number) of armi, turakhi, nali, and yadi. Every one of these animals he placed in separate enclosures. He brought up their young ones and counted them as carefully as young lambs. As to the creatures called burkish, utrati (dromedaries?), tishani, and dagari, he wrote for them and they came. The dromedaries he kept in enclosures, where he brought up their young ones. He entrusted each kind of animal to men of their own country to tend them. There were also curious animals of the Mediterranean Sea, which the King of Egypt sent as a gift and entrusted to the care of men of their own land. The very choicest animals were there in abundance, and birds of heaven with beautiful wings. It was a splendid menagerie, and all the work of his own hands. The names of the animals were placed beside them."

[Rome.]—The extravagant demands for the amphitheatre of ancient Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa, and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent. I will quote one instance from Gibbon:—

"By the order of Probus, a vast quantity of large trees torn up by the roots were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow-deer, and a thousand wild boars, and all this variety of game was abandoned to the riotous impetuosity of the multitude. The tragedy of the succeeding day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of lionesses, two hundred leopards, and three hundred bears."

Farther on we read of a spectacle by the younger Gordian of "twenty zebras, ten elks, ten giraffes, thirty African hyenas, ten Indian tigers, a rhinoceros, an hippopotamus, and thirty-two elephants."

[Mexico.]—Gomara, the friend and executor of Herman Cortes, states: —

"There were here also many cages made of stout beams, in some of which there were lions (pumas); in others, tigers (jaguars); in others, ounces; in others, wolves; nor was there any animal on four legs that was not there. They had for their rations deer and other animals of the chase. There were also kept in large jars or tanks, snakes, alligators, and lizards. In another court there were cages containing every kind of birds of prey, such as vultures, a dozen sorts of falcons and hawks, eagles, and owls. The large eagles received turkeys for their food. Our Spaniards were astonished at seeing such a diversity of birds and beasts; nor did they find it pleasant to hear the hissing of the poisonous snakes, the roaring of the lions, the shrill cries of the wolves, nor the groans of the other animals given to them for food."

[Peru.]—Garcilasso de la Vega (Commentaries Reales, v. 10), the son of a Spanish conqueror by an Indian princess, born and bred in Peru, writes:—

"All the strange birds and beasts which the chiefs presented to the Inca were kept at court, both for grandeur and also to please the Indians who presented them. When I came to Cuzco, I remember there were some remains of places where they kept these creatures. One was the serpent conservatory, and another where they kept the pumas, jaguars, and bears."

[Syria and Greece.]—I could have said something on Solomon's apes and peacocks, and could have quoted at length the magnificent order given by Alexander the Great (Pliny, Nat. Hist., viii. 16) towards supplying material for Aristotle's studies in natural history; but enough has been said to prove what I maintained, namely, that numerous cases occur, year after year, and age after age, in which every animal of note is captured and its capabilities of domestication unconsciously tested.

I would accept in a more stringent sense than it was probably intended to bear, the text of St. James, who wrote at a time when a vast variety and multitude of animals were constantly being forwarded to Rome and to Antioch for amphitheatrical shows. He says (James iii. 7), "Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind."

I conclude from what I have stated that there is no animal worthy of domestication that has not frequently been captured, and might ages ago have established itself as a domestic breed, had it not been deficient in certain necessary particulars which I shall proceed to discuss. These are numerous and so stringent as to leave no ground for wonder that out of the vast abundance of the animal creation, only a few varieties of a few species should have become the companions of man.

It by no means follows that because a savage cares to take home a young fawn to amuse himself, his family, and his friends, that he will always continue to feed or to look after it. Such attention would require a steadiness of purpose foreign to the ordinary character of a savage. But herein lie two shrewd tests of the eventual destiny of the animal as a domestic species.

Hardiness.—It must be able to shift for itself and to thrive, although it is neglected; since, if it wanted much care, it would never be worth its keep.

The hardiness of our domestic animals is shown by the rapidity with which they establish themselves in new lands. The goats and hogs left on islands by the earlier navigators throve excellently on the whole. The horse has taken possession of the Pampas, and the sheep and ox of Australia. The dog is hardly repressible in the streets of an Oriental town.

Fondness of Man.—Secondly, it must cling to man, notwithstanding occasional hard usage and frequent neglect. If the animal had no natural attachment to our species, it would fret itself to death, or escape and revert to wildness. It is easy to find cases where the partial or total non-fulfilment of this condition is a corresponding obstacle to domestication. Some kinds of cattle are too precious to be discarded, but very troublesome to look after. Such are the reindeer to the Lapps. Mr. Campbell of Islay informed me that the tamest of certain herds of them look as if they were wild; they have to be caught with a lasso to be milked. If they take fright, they are off to the hills; consequently the Lapps are forced to accommodate themselves to the habits of their beasts, and to follow them from snow to sea and from sea to snow at different seasons. The North American reindeer has never been domesticated, owing, I presume, to this cause. The Peruvian herdsmen would have had great trouble to endure had the llama and alpaca not existed, for their cogeners, the huanacu and the vicuna, are hardly to be domesticated.

Zebras, speaking broadly, are unmanageable. The Dutch Boers constantly endeavour to break them to harness, and though they occasionally succeed to a degree, the wild mulish nature of the animal is always breaking out, and liable to balk them.

It is certain that some animals have naturally a greater fondness for man than others; and as a proof of this, I will again quote Hearne about the moose, who are considered by him to be the easiest to tame and domesticate of any of the deer tribe. Formerly the closely-allied European elks were domesticated in Sweden, and used to draw sledges, as they are now occasionally in Canada; but they have been obsolete for many years. Hearne says:—

"The young ones are so simple that I remember to have seen an Indian paddle his canoe up to one of them, and take it by the poll, without experiencing the least opposition, the poor harmless animal seeming at the same time as contented alongside the canoe as if swimming by the side of its dam, and looking up in our faces with the same fearless innocence that a house lamb would."

On the other hand, a young bison will try to dash out its brains against the tree to which it is tied, in terror and hatred of its captors.

It is interesting to note the causes that conduce to a decided attachment of certain animals to man, or between one kind of animal and another. It is notorious that attachments and aversions exist in nature. Swallows, rooks, and storks frequent dwelling houses; ostriches and zebras herd together; so do bisons and elks. On the other hand, deer and sheep, which are both gregarious, and both eat the same food and graze within the same enclosure, avoid one another. The spotted Danish dog, the Spitz dog, and the cat, have all a strong attachment to horses, and horses seem pleased with their company; but dogs and cats are proverbially discordant. I presume that two species of animals do not consider one another companionable, or clubable, unless their behaviour and their persons are reciprocally agreeable. A phlegmatic animal would be exceedingly disquieted by the close companionship of an excitable one. The movements of one beast may have a character that is unpleasing to the eyes of another; his cries may sound discordant; his smell may be repulsive. Two herds of animals would hardly intermingle, unless their respective languages of action and of voice were mutually intelligible. The animal which above all others is a companion to man is the dog, and we observe how readily their proceedings are intelligible to each other. Every whine or bark of the dog, each of his fawning, savage, or timorous movements is the exact counterpart of what would have been the man's behaviour, had he felt similar emotions. As the man understands the thoughts of the dog, so the dog understands the thoughts of the man, by attending to his natural voice, his countenance, and his actions. A man irritates a dog by an ordinary laugh, he frightens him by an angry look, or he calms him by a kindly bearing; but he has less spontaneous hold over an ox or a sheep. He must study their ways and tutor his behaviour before he can either understand the feelings of those animals or make his own intelligible to them. He has no natural power at all over many other creatures. Who, for instance, ever succeeded in frowning away a mosquito, or in pacifying an angry wasp by a smile?

Desire of Comfort.—This is a motive which strongly attaches certain animals to human habitations, even though they are unwelcome: it is a motive which few persons who have not had an opportunity of studying animals in savage lands are likely to estimate at its true value. The life of all beasts in their wild state is an exceedingly anxious one. From my own recollection, I believe that every antelope in South Africa has to run for its life every one or two days upon an average, and that he starts or gallops under the influence of a false alarm many times in a day. Those who have crouched at night by the side of pools in the desert, in order to have a shot at the beasts that frequent them, see strange scenes of animal life; how the creatures gambol at one moment and fight at another; how a herd suddenly halts in strained attention, and then breaks into a maddened rush, as one of them becomes conscious of the stealthy movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures, but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors, either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed indignantly into the forest with his ribs aching from blows and stones. If a comfort-loving animal, he will probably be no gainer by the change, more serious alarms and no less ill-usage awaits him; he hears the roar of the wild beasts and the headlong gallop of the frightened herds, and he finds the buttings and the kicks of other animals harder to endure than the blows from which he fled. He has the disadvantage of being a stranger, for the herds of his own species which he seeks for companionship constitute so many cliques, into which he can only find admission by more fighting with their strongest members than he has spirit to undergo. As a set-off against these miseries, the freedom of savage life has no charms for his temperament; so the end of it is, that with a heavy heart he turns back to the habitation he had quitted. When animals thoroughly enjoy the excitement of wild life, I presume they cannot be domesticated, they could only be tamed, for they would never return from the joys of the wilderness after they had once tasted them through some accidental wandering.

Gallinas, or guinea-fowl, have so little care for comfort, or indeed for man, that they fall but a short way within the frontier of domestication. It is only in inclement seasons that they take contentedly to the poultry-yards.

Elephants, from their size and power, are not dependent on man for protection; hence, those that have been reared as pets from the time they were calves, and have never learned to dread and obey the orders of a driver, are peculiarly apt to revert to wildness if they once are allowed to wander and escape to the woods. I believe this tendency, together with the cost of maintenance and the comparative uselessness of the beasts, are among the chief causes why Africans never tame them now; though they have not wholly lost the practice of capturing them when full-grown, and of keeping them imprisoned for some days alive. Mr. Winwood Reade's account of captured elephants, seen by himself near Glass Town in Equatorial Western Africa, is very curious.

Usefulness to Man.—To proceed with the list of requirements which a captured animal must satisfy before it is possible he could be permanently domesticated: there is the very obvious condition that he should be useful to man; otherwise, in growing to maturity, and losing the pleasing youthful ways which had first attracted his captors and caused them to make a pet of him, he would be repelled. As an instance in point, I will mention seals. Many years ago I used to visit Shetland, when those animals were still common, and I heard many stories of their being tamed: one will suffice:—A fisherman caught a young seal; it was very affectionate, and frequented his hut, fishing for itself in the sea. At length it grew self-willed and unwieldy; it used to push the children and snap at strangers, and it was voted a nuisance, but the people could not bear to kill it on account of its human ways. One day the fisherman took it with him in his boat, and dropped it in a stormy sea, far from home; the stratagem was unsuccessful; in a day or two the well-known scuffling sound of the seal, as it floundered up to the hut, was again heard; the animal had found its way home. Some days after the poor creature was shot by a sporting stranger, who saw it basking and did not know it was tame. Now had the seal been a useful animal and not troublesome, the fisherman would doubtless have caught others, and set a watch over them to protect them; and then, if they bred freely and were easy to tend, it is likely enough he would have produced a domestic breed.

The utility of the animals as a store of future food is undoubtedly the most durable reason for maintaining them; but I think it was probably not so early a motive as the chief's pleasure in possessing them. That was the feeling under which the menageries, described above, were established. Whatever the despot of savage tribes is pleased with becomes invested with a sort of sacredness. His tame animals would be the care of all his people, who would become skilful herdsmen under the pressure of fear. It would be as much as their lives were worth if one of the creatures were injured through their neglect. I believe that the keeping of a herd of beasts, with the sole motive of using them as a reserve for food, or as a means of barter, is a late idea in the history of civilisation. It has now become established among the pastoral races of South Africa, owing to the traffickings of the cattle-traders, but it was by no means prevalent in Damara-Land when I travelled there in 1852. I then was surprised to observe the considerations that induced the chiefs to take pleasure in their vast herds of cattle. They were valued for their stateliness and colour, far more than for their beef. They were as the deer of an English squire, or as the stud of a man who has many more horses than he can ride. An ox was almost a sacred beast in Damara-Land, not to be killed except on momentous occasions, and then as a sort of sacrificial feast, in which all bystanders shared. The payment of two oxen was hush-money for the life of a man. I was considerably embarrassed by finding that I had the greatest trouble in buying oxen for my own use, with the ordinary articles of barter. The possessor would hardly part with them for any remuneration; they would never sell their handsomest beasts.

One of the ways in which the value of tamed beasts would be soon appreciated would be that of giving milk to children. It is marvellous how soon goats find out children and tempt them to suckle. I have had the milk of my goats, when encamping for the night in African travels, drained dry by small black children, who had not the strength to do more than crawl about, but nevertheless came to some secret understanding with the goats and fed themselves. The records of many nations have legends like that of Romulus and Remus, who are stated to have been suckled by wild beasts. These are surprisingly confirmed by General Sleeman's narrative of six cases where children were nurtured for many years by wolves in Oude. (Journey through Oude in 1849-50, i. 206.)

Breeding freely.—Domestic animals must breed freely under confinement. This necessity limits very narrowly the number of species which might otherwise have been domesticated. It is one of the most important of all the conditions that have to be satisfied. The North American turkey, reared from the eggs of the wild bird, is stated to be unknown in the third generation, in captivity. Our turkey comes from Mexico, and was abundantly domesticated by the ancient Mexicans.

The Indians of the Upper Amazon took turtle and placed them in lagoons for use in seasons of scarcity. The Spaniards who first saw them called these turtle "Indian cattle." They would certainly have become domesticated like cattle, if they had been able to breed in captivity.

Easy to tend.—They must be tended easily. When animals reared in the house are suffered to run about in the companionship of others like themselves, they naturally revert to much of their original wildness. It is therefore essential to domestication that they should possess some quality by which large numbers of them may be controlled by a few herdsmen. The instinct of gregariousness is such a quality. The herdsman of a vast troop 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 for slaughter, when ever it was necessary that one of the flock should be killed. The tamest cattle—those that seldom ran away, that kept the flock together and led them homewards—would be preserved alive longer than any of the others. It is therefore these that chiefly become the parents of stock, and bequeath their domestic aptitudes to the future herd. I have constantly witnessed this process of selection among the pastoral savages of South Africa. I believe it to be a very important one, on account of its rigour and its regularity. It must have existed from the earliest times, and have been in continuous operation, generation after generation, down to the present day.

Exceptions.—I have already mentioned the African elephant, the North American reindeer, and the apparent, but not real exception of the North American turkey. I should add the ducks and geese of North America, but I cannot consider them in the light of a very strong case, for a savage who constantly changes his home is not likely to carry aquatic birds along with him. Beyond these few, I know of no notable exceptions to my theory.