Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/333

 the Argali; and in the opinion of Pallas, which has been very generally adopted by zoologists, the goat is the same with the Ægagrus, a gregarious quadruped, which occupies the loftiest parts of the mountains extending from the Caucasus to the South of the Caspian Sea, and thence to the North of India. Indeed the history of these animals is so interwoven with the history of man, that those naturalists have not reasoned quite correctly, who have thought it necessary to refer the first origin of either of them to any wild stock at all. They assume, that these quadrupeds first existed in an undomesticated state, that is, entirely apart from man and independent of him; that, as he advanced in civilization, as his wants multiplied, and he became more ingenious and active in inventing methods of supplying them, the thought struck him, that he might obtain from these wild beasts the materials of his food and clothing; and that he therefore caught and confined some of them and in the course of time rendered them by cultivation more and more suitable to his purposes.

We have no reason to assume, that man and the two lesser kinds of horned cattle were originally independent of one another. So far as geology supplies any evidence, it is in favor of the supposition, that these quadrupeds and man belong to the same epoch. No properly fossil bones either of the sheep or goat have yet been found, and we have no reason to believe, that these animals were produced until the creation of man. But, as we must suppose, that man was created perfect and full-grown, and with those means of subsistence around him, which his nature and constitution require, there is no reason why the sheep and the goat may not have been created in such a state as to be adapted immediately both for clothing and for food, or why it should be considered more probable that they were at first entirely wild. They may have been produced originally in the same abode, which was occupied by that variety of the human race, to whose habits and mode of life the use of them has always been so essential; and, if we assume,