conquest that man has ever made; for he is
the first element in the progress of humanity.
Without the dog, man would have been
compelled to vegetate eternally on the border-land
of Savagery. The dog enables human society to
pass from the savage to the patriarchal state,
by presenting it with flocks and herds. No
dog, no flock nor herd,—no flock nor herd, no
certain means of subsistence; no leg of mutton,
nor roast beef at pleasure; no wool,
no plaids, nor burnous; no leisure hours, no
astronomical observations, no science, no
industry. The dog has enabled mankind to
find time for all those things. The east is
the cradle of civilisation, because the east
is the native land of the dog. Take away the
dog from Asia, and Asia is no better off than
America. What constitutes the superiority
of the Old over the New World, is the
possession of the dog. What, in fact, is the end
of all the efforts of intellect, all the labours
of the Mohican, who has only the chace to
depend on for a subsistence? It is nothing
more than the study of the great art of
tracking and following his game, or his enemy.
Now, that young terrier who is peeping out
of his kennel, knows as much, or more, of
this difficult science after six months' study,
as the most intelligent savage at the end of
forty years. The natives of the East, then,
who possessed the dog, were relieved from an
amount of painful labour which employed the
whole life and faculties of the Red Skins.
They had time to spare, and they were able
to employ it in the creation of industry.
Such is the origin of arts and trades; such
is the whole difference between the Old and
New Continents. Historians have written
thousands of volumes on this grave question,
without lighting upon the discovery of this
simple truth; and brave anatomists continue
to dissect the sculls of Americans, in order
to find out the cause of the inferiority of that
race, without even suspecting that they are
wandering a hundred leagues away from the
solution of the problem.

To this new and luminous anthropological
solution there hangs another observation,
which is equally my own, namely that
cannibalism is an endemic disease in all countries
that have the misfortune to be without dogs.
Why is cannibalism never met with amongst
pastoral nations, amongst the Chaldeans,
Egyptians, Arabians, Mongolians, and Tartars?
Because the milk and flesh of the herds and
flocks, with which the dog has endowed those
nations, constantly preserve them from the
criminal temptations of hunger. On this
subject, I will beg permission not to add my
anathema to those which have so often been
hurled against anthropophagy by the hand
of false morality and false philanthropy.
Cannibalism Is one of the diseases of the earliest
infancy of humanity; a depraved taste which
famine explains, if it does not entirely justify.
Pity the cannibal, and don't abuse him, ye
members of civilised society, who eat underdone
meat, and kill millions of men, for much
less plausible motives than hunger. According
to my own ideas, of all the wars which
men wage against each other, war for the
sake of eating one's enemy is the only rational
warfare on the whole list. Roasting
one's adversary after he is dead, is not half
so senseless and wicked an action as killing
him by wholesale when he feels no inclination
to die. From cannibalism, and all its attendant
horrors, our faithful friend, the dog, has
rescued us. It is not his fault if we still
commit the most atrocious form of human
madness—war.

Behold a specimen of domestic swine, which
are allowed the entrée of the menagerie. If
the pig still continued to lend to man the aid
of his snout to discover and disinter the
truffle, I should have been able to include
him in the list of auxiliaries; but it is evident
that the moment he allowed the dog to displace
him from his special function, he lost the right
of figuring in that honourable class. I may
be told that he has been employed in St
Domingo and elsewhere, as a call-pig, playing
exactly the same part in the woods as his
passional homologue, the call-duck, does upon
the lake. I do not deny the fact; but the
mere act of calling, quacking, or grunting,
does not constitute an auxiliary. There is,
besides, another reason of a superior order,
a reason of analogy, which compels me to
refuse that title to the pig. He is the
emblem of the miser; and the miser is good for
nothing till after his death. Consequently
it was not amongst the pig's possibilities to
be useful to man during his life.

The he-goat, the mutilated type of the
Bouquetin of the Pyrenees and the Alps, has
never enjoyed any great reputation for sanctity,
and I will not take upon me to assert that he
has acquired a much worse name than he
deserves. It is very certain that, by his
dissolute morals, he lays himself open to
calumny, and that the odour he exhales does
not symbolise a model of purity. He is the
emblem of brutal sensuality. The Greek,
Jewish, and Christian religions accord with
analogy in this respect. The Greeks were
not content with sacrificing a goat to Bacchus,
as being one of the vine's enemies, one of the
plagues of attractive labour; they disguised
their satyrs with the mask and character of
the lascivious animal, in order to brand gross
and material love with an unmistakeable
mark of reprobation, in order to declare their
belief that purely sensual passion is degrading
to man, and lowers him to the level of the
brute.

I am sorry to pass sentence on a poor
animal already laden with the sins of Israel;
but I cannot find it in my heart to utter a
word of excuse for an emblem of lust and
moral filth, for an enemy of vineyards and
agriculture. I confess that the future prospects
of the goat fill me with considerable
alarm; for I find no employment for him in