of selection. The most wild are killed when food is wanted, and the
most tame and easy to manage kept, because they are more agreeable
to human indolence, and so the keeper likes them best. Captain
Galton, who has often seen strange scenes of savage and of animal
life, had better describe the process:--'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--
whenever it was necessary that one of the flock should be killed.
The tamest cattle--those which seldom ran away, that kept the flocks
together, and those which led them homeward--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.' [Footnote: Ethnological Society's
Transactions, vol. iii. p. 137.]

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he
was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And
the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest
tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the
strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal
vigour, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all
have enough of it. But what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe,
one bit of a tribe--to differ from another is their relative faculty
of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least
indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The