Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/434

420 The resulting purity of the surface of the streets would have an excellent aesthetic effect upon the population, particularly on those who live in the dirty streets, and would prompt them to purify their own homes, make them pleasant and adorn them—works from which they are now discouraged by the public filth that surrounds them, and which they can not help. Other sanitary improvement would follow the general adoption of these pavements, in the relief from nervous disorders which would be gained by the cessation of the noise of the stone pavements and the worry from their dust and joltings. "The time has come when the sanitarian must extend his field even beyond mere physical causes of disease, and look to the palliation of the effects of incessant struggles and conflicts which a business man of the present day must undergo. . . . Quieting influences are worth almost any price, and these should be sought and provided along with those which relate to physical health."

Origin of Domestic Dogs.—Professor Huxley, in the second of two lectures on dogs which he recently delivered at the Royal Institution, examined the peculiarities of the animals of the dog kind, and pointed out that the only respect in which the varieties presented any very great or remarkable difference, apart from the color of the skin or fur and other minor details, was in the structure of the skull and in the teeth. The form of dog which departed most widely from the rest in its dentition was the octocyon, a small, fox-like creature belonging to South Africa, which had forty-eight teeth, while other dogs had forty-two. The dog-like animals might be divided into two classes according to the peculiarities of the skull—those like the wolf, or the thooids, having a great cavity over the brow which causes the front to be prominent; and those like the fox, or the alopecoids, which are without this cavity. This enabled them to fix the position of the domestic dogs still more definitely; it would occupy a place in the series corresponding with that in winch they had put the jackals and wolves. With regard to the stag-hound, the shepherd's dog, and many of the cur-dogs, no one would have the slightest hesitation in placing them just between the wolf and the jackal. Some domestic dogs had as large a development of skull as the wolf, but the appearance of sagacity it gave them could not be depended upon, for it was often due to the existence of the cavity. Speculating upon the probable origin of the domestic dog, Professor Huxley called attention to the fact that, in Northwest America, the Indian dog was not really distinguishable from the prairie-wolf. The domestication of these animals was easily explicable when it was remembered that, although fierce enough when stirred up, they were endowed with singular curiosity, which attracted them particularly toward man and his doings, and that, when caught young and kindly treated, they soon became as attached and devoted to their masters as ordinary dogs. A domesticated stock might thus have readily been produced. If this one domestic dog had originated in the taming by man of an indigenous wild animal, then the general problem of the original taming of domestic dogs would take this form: "Can we find wild stock so similar to the existing dog that there is no improbability in concluding them to be the same animals?" He thought we could. We might trace dog-like animals farther and farther west until, in northern Africa, we had a whole series of kinds of such animals usually known as jackals, presenting every conceivable gradation between the characteristic of the dog and the characteristic of the jackal. He believed these wild stocks were the source whence, in each region of the world, the savages who originally began to tame dogs had derived their stock. This was confirmed by the latest archaeological evidence. The monuments of ancient Egypt had preserved a great variety of dogs, but it was an interesting fact that the oldest monuments contained the smallest number of varieties, and in the third and fourth dynasties there were only two well-marked forms of dogs—one a small, cur-like animal, resembling the one that now haunted the streets of Cairo, and the other of a form more like that of the greyhound. The cur was, no doubt, a tame species of the wild jackal, which was still to be found in the same country; and, with respect to the greyhound, there was in Abyssinia a very long-headed dog, which was very