Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. George P. Marsh
the States of the American Union, was, in round numbers, 7,300,000; of asses and mules, 1,300,000; of the ox tribe, 29,000,000;[64] of sheep, 25,000,000; and of swine, 39,000,000. The only North American quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, and sufficiently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi basin and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within the last ten years on the great plains near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites first established themselves on the prairies.[65] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture ground is collected into a single army, which is seen at or very near any one point only for a few days during the entire season. Hence there is risk of great error in estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district from the magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place of observation; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor probable that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous in North America as the domestic bovine species is at present. The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of deer,[66] though sufficient for the wants of a sparse savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must always have been very rare.
Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, were few compared with their domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were far less important as geographical elements than the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized man on the same continent.
Origin and Transfer of Domestic Quadrupeds.
Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know historically nothing, because their domestication belongs to the ages which preceded written history; but though they cannot all be specifically identified with now extant wild animals, it is presumable that they have been reclaimed from an originally wild state. Ancient annalists have preserved to us fewer data respecting the introduction of domestic animals into new countries than respecting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. Ritter, in his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this animal was not employed by the Egyptians until a comparatively late period in their history; that he was unknown to the Carthaginians until after the downfall of their commonwealth; and that his first appearance in Western Africa is more recent still. The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third or fourth century.[67] The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the special civilization for which those regions are adapted. America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo.[68] Of course, it owes the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the swine, as does also Australia, to European colonization. Modern Europe has, thus far, not accomplished much in the way of importation of new animals, though some interesting essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully introduced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar attempts failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cashmere or Thibet goat was brought to France a generation since, and succeeds well. The same or an allied species and the Asiatic buffalo were carried to South Carolina about the year 1850, and the former, at least, is thought likely to prove of permanent value in the United States. The yak, or Tartary ox, seems to thrive in France, and success has attended the recent efforts to introduce the South American alpaca into Europe.
Extirpation of Quadrupeds.
Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is perhaps destined ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild quadrupeds as he cannot profitably domesticate, yet their numbers often fluctuate, and even after they seem almost extinct, they sometimes suddenly increase, without any intentional steps to promote such a result on his part. During the wars which followed the French Revolution, the wolf multiplied in many parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were withdrawn from the woods to chase a nobler game, and partly because the bodies of slain men and horses supplied this voracious quadruped with more abundant food. The same animal became again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of the rural population by the Russian Government. On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the beaver was extensively employed as a material for fine hats, it bore a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers' fur fell off, and this animal—whose habits, as we have seen, are an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature—immediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent.
Since the invention of gunpowder, some quadrupeds have completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the bear was extirpated from that island still earlier. The British wild ox exists only in a few English and Scottish parks, while in Irish bogs, of no great apparent antiquity, are found antlers which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger than any extant European species. The lion is believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in the first-named two of these countries at the time of the first Crusades.[69] Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, are utterly extinct, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The Nibelungen-Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from about the year 1,200, though its original composition no doubt belongs to an earlier period, thus sings:
Then slowe the dowghtie Sigfrid a wisent and an elk,
He smote four stoute uroxen and a grim and sturdie schelk.[70]
Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk became extinct is not known. The auerochs survived in Prussia until the middle of the last century, but unless it is identical with a similar quadruped said to be found on the Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz, where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great menageries, as for example that at Schönbrunn, near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is closely allied to the American wapiti, if not specifically the same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred individuals. The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined to the Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of the Dora Baltea and the Orco.
Number of Birds in the United States.
The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural life than the quadrupeds, and, in their relations to the economy of nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed animals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic turkey[71] is probably more numerous in the territory of the United States than the wild bird of the same species ever was, and the grouse cannot, at the period of their greatest abundance, have counted as many as we now number of the common hen. The dove, however, must fall greatly