If the Doctor had known that Nobs was of Tartarian extraction, this fact would sufficiently have accounted for the excellences of that incomparable roadster. He explained them quite as satisfactorily to himself by the fancy which he amused himself with supporting on this occasion, that this marvellous horse was a son of the Wind. And hence he inferred that Nobs possessed the innate qualities of his kind in greater perfection than any other horse, as approaching nearer to the original perfection in which the species was created. For although animals are each in their kind less degenerate than man, whom so many circumstances have tended to injure in his physical nature, still, he argued, all which like the horse have been made subservient to the uses of man, were in some degree deteriorated by that subjection. Innate qualities, however, he admitted were more apparent in the brute creation than in the human creature, because even in those which suffer most by domestication, the course of nature is not so violently overruled.
I except the Duck, he would say. That bird, which Nature hath made free of earth, air and water, loses by servitude the use of one element, the enjoyment of two, and the freedom of all three.
Look at the Pig also, said the Doctor. In his wild state no animal is cleaner, happier, or better able to make himself respected. Look at him when tamed,—I will not say in a brawn-case, for I am not speaking now of those cruelties which the Devil and Man between them have devised,—but look at him prowling at large about the purlieus of his sty. What a loathsome poor despised creature hath man made him!
Animal propter convivia natum.2
Every cur thinks itself privileged to take him by the ear; whereas if he were once more free in the woods, the stoutest mastiff or wolf-dog would not dare look him in the face.
2 JUVENAL.
Yet he was fond of maintaining that the lower creation are capable of intellectual improvement. In Holland indeed he had seen the school for dogs, where poodles go through a regular course of education, and where by this time perhaps the Lancasterian inventions have been introduced. But this was not what the Doctor contemplated. Making bears and elephants dance, teaching dogs to enact ballets, and horses to exhibit tricks at a fair, he considered as the freaks of man's capricious cruelty, and instances of that abuse of power which he so frequently exercises over his inferior creatures, and for which he must one day render an account, together with all those whose countenance of such spectacles affords the temptation to exhibit them.
In truth the power which animals as well as men possess, of conforming themselves to new situations and forming new habits adapted to new circumstances is proof of a capability of improvement. The wild dogs in the plains of La Plata, burrow, because there is no security for them above ground against stronger beasts of prey. In the same country owls make their nests in the ground, because there are neither trees nor buildings to afford them concealment. A clergyman in Iceland by sowing angelica upon a Lake-island some miles from the sea, not only attracted gulls and wild ducks to breed there, but brought about an alliance between those birds, who are not upon neighbourly terms elsewhere. Both perceived that the new plants afforded better shelter from wind and rain, than any thing which they had seen before; there was room enough for both; and neighbourhood produced so much good will, that the gulls protected the weaker birds not only against the ravens who are common enemies, but against another species of gull also which attacks the duck's nest.
A change more remarkable than either of these, is that which the common hearth-cricket has undergone in its very constitution as well as in all its ways of life, since men built houses and inhabited cold climates.
The field-cricket in North America, which buries itself during the winter ten inches deep and there lies torpid, began about an hundred years ago to avail itself of the work of man and take up its abode in the chimnies. This insect even likes man for a bed-fellow, not with any such felonious intentions as are put in execution by smaller and viler vermin, but for the sake of warmth. The Swedish traveller, Kalm, says that when he and his companions were forced to sleep in uninhabited places, the crickets got into the folds of their garments, so that they were obliged to make some tarriance every morning, and search carefully before they could get rid of them.