Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes comparatively little
with the arrangements of nature, [Footnote: It is an interesting and not
hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the domestication of the
organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, belongs, not indeed
to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, the
conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced
stages of artificial culture. Civilization has added little to the
number of vegetable or animal species grown in our fields or bred in our
folds--the cranberry and the wild grape being almost the only plants
which the Anglo-American has reclaimed out of our most native flora and
added to his harvests--while, on the contrary, the subjugation of the
inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of man's sway over, not
the annual products of the earth only, but her substance and her springs
of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined and cultivated
ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as a
projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest
savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in the
blowpipe, is more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the
inclined plane, the wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems
almost unknown except to civilized man. I have myself seen European
peasants to whom one of the simplest applications of this latter power
was a revelation.

It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the
psychology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with
imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life, that although these
humble tribes and individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of
the lower animals to the gratification of their appetites and the supply
of their other physical wants, yet they nevertheless seem to cherish