[ao] Men have aimed at accomplishing their purpose partly by training animals, and partly by breeding through select specimens of each race. The two principles thus relied on are habit and heredity. Respecting the latter of these a note of considerable length had been intended in this place. But the reader interested in the general question can learn sufficient details in Dr. Carpenter's Mental Physiology together with the authorities therein referred to by him.
The following instances adduced by Mr. Wallace to show how improvement through heredity is visibly limited are very remarkable. "In the matter of speed, a limit of a definite kind as regards land animals does exist in nature. All the swiftest animals—deer, antelopes, hares, foxes, lions, leopards, horses, zebras, and many others—have reached very nearly the same degree of speed. Although the swiftest of each must have been for ages preserved, and the slowest must have perished, we have no reason to believe there is any advance of speed. The possible limit under existing conditions, and perhaps under possible terrestrial conditions, has been long ago reached." He immediately proceeds to place in contrast with these, some examples where progress is not thus barred. "In cases, however, where this limit had not been so nearly reached as in the horse, we have been enabled to make a more marked advance and to produce a greater difference of form. The wild dog is an animal that hunts much in company, and trusts more to endurance than to speed. Man has produced the greyhound, which differs much more from the wolf or the dingo than the racer does from the wild Arabian. Domestic dogs, again, have varied more in size and in form than the whole family of Canidæ in a state of Nature. No wild dog, fox, or wolf, is either so small as some of the smallest terriers and spaniels, or so large as the largest varieties of hound or Newfoundland dog. And, certainly, no two wild animals of the family differ so widely in form and proportions as the Chinese pug and the Italian greyhound, or the bulldog and the common greyhound. The known range of variation is, therefore, more than enough for the derivation of all the forms of Dogs, Wolves, and Foxes from a common ancestor." Wallace. Natural Selection, pp. 292, 3.
Dr. Prichard's accounts of similar variations in his Natural History of Man and other ethnological works are particularly interesting.
Habit is a topic more germane to the subject of self-training, and is therefore examined at some length in our text.
It seems natural that the empire of both Habit and Heredity should be strongest over the purely automatous, and the instinctive or semi-instinctive actions of mankind. Witness the effect of Caste institutions, Guilds, and family vocations. Regular occupation struck a certain visitor to this world as producing a like result:—
"Nimbly," quoth he, "do the fingers move
If a man be but used to his trade."
[ap] "They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beast by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It destroys likewise magnanimity, and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God, or 'melior natura'; which courage is manifestly such as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain'; therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty." Bacon. Essay on Atheism, p. 56.
"What joy to watch in lower creature
Such dawning of a moral nature,