ANIMALS PAST AND PRESENT.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 10 April 1914, Page 2

ANIMALS PAST AND PRESENT.

AS NATURE MADE AND MAN KE- ' MABI. Mostly, if an ancestor of a, domes- j ticated animal or fowl were to meet ; one of his descendants, he would say of it to his nearest neighbour., as Beau Bruxnmel said of the Prince of Wales :: "Who's your fat friend ?" The ethnologists are not altogether sure how long man has been at work trying to improve ! himself, by methods which only now- j adidys I e.uii to approach the thor- ! oughness he employs with other i creatuies- They think 500,000 i years would be about the limit. But I so far as the records go in his j BL-ri.anking of field and fold the ! time isn't very much longer than i that which must have elapsed since Noah ran the Ark aground on the ' top of Mount Ararat and let the animals out. When you come to analyse man's wonders in animal transformations, the most remarkable are the beasts: which do not feed him, but merely serve him. Those that now serve, him least, but remain still in his i employ, are the very ones that constitute the most curious freaks of nature. Thi-y represent his whims*.' and fancies rather than his actual needs. The dingo dog, that simple-souled: denizen of the Australian wilds, isl] a fanged beast that owns no tame*-' ancestors, and has evolved occord-: ing to the troubles of his own j neighbourhood- He is therefore, a j wild dog of goodly size. i j3ut when we compare him with i the giant mastiff, the big St. Her- j nard, the lean Russian wolf hound and the Italian greyhound, we find them all as markedly freaks beside him as :ire the ridiculous little sleeve dogs which China s emperors took 1,000 years to debase into pitiful curiosities, and the crazylooking bulldogs with which our sportsmen have managed to outrage nature in a couple of hundred years. Next to the dog, in time of servitude, but invariably less of a. slave to man's pitiless rule, comes the domestic cat. For Tom's ancestors we can go as far back as the great sabre-toothed tiger. ITe was an appalling monster of the days before Adam, which would have liked nothing better than a game of mousing with a Bengal tiger in the role of the mouse. We can't tpll how many prehistoric Nubians used cats to clear their foetid huts of vermin ; but the sys-t'-m of seeking hunters of their class small enough tq play the part of a ferret must have gone on a long time, with man's crude efforts at down-breeding steadily making . the off-spring of the original wild cat a miserable apology of his forbears. When, however, one comes to the horse, so long used for his speed and his strength, he finds an animal as markedly improved as these other animals of man have degenerated. In the very, very voting world that has bean called the lower F.ccene—which is to be reckoned by millions instead of thousands of distant years, there was a tiny animal, more graceful than the fawn, and more swift of foot^ which science has agreed to call the little eohip-p-us. A small deer would be about the eohippus' size when it came to measurement. The little Eohippus was regarded as meat by many ferocious beasts of his time and fell prey to them. Yet not so often but that he man- j aged .to scramble along at the rate of something like aeroplane speed | on his four toes for countless generations, until the constant evolu- ! tion of his feet for speed purposes reduced his toe supply at length ; down to the one which we find in the horse and all his progeny. j The wild horse, when -man took; hold of him, wasn't much more than good pony size, at his best, and he was built for the same old marathons he had been running, ancestrally, for millions of years. All his h.:irrm master asked of him at first was ability to bear the burden of :.h- human body and do some mode-' rate hustling under it. So the wild iu.rs ■ '•uned somewhat in sturdiness, but Ist in speed. He also began to enjoy regular rations. There are few horses running wild nowadays that are not descended from strains which have long been bred in captivity. Little eohippus, once weighing, perhaps, less than fifty pounds, now in some classes has grown to look like the side of a house, and he may weigh a ton and not be looked upon an anything surprising1. The bull, the pig, even the chicken, have all fared according to their usefulness as foocU Away back in the Pliocene period, which was millions of years ago, there was a pi;)nt boar which lived along the river bonks and grubbed for its living, just as the wild boar does to-day in the forests. It was really a young hippota.mus ; bur, it took to the laiid instead of the water, and ft, grew longer legs and a more active body. In time it evolved into tfa'i wild boar. But man, finding that roast pig tasted good, hastened to make as much pig as he could from every specimen he rearrrri, until he got them virtually all fat, and so weakened in co-nstitu-i.ion that they could scarcely reproduce their kind. The chicken, now represented in .^t:~ ■'■ •■as si^es, colours and shapes, •- ..s a. very beautiful little game-

cock d I 'India, lie has been Burbanked to the size oi a. turkey, and n* OJ >c can tell where it would have .' stopped if we hadn't found our a «ed for eggs greater than our need for white meat. AsJ for the bull and the cow, chances t are they will on growing. [The wild ox of India, the nearest i sur\a' ivor of their kind at large, dons not look unlike the domestic bull ; but. centuries of heavy feeding and com] ui.ralively little exercise have mad c a huge, tin wieldly bulk and haul ? tended, to deprive the domesticata fl 'lireed of its proudest orna- ! men t. the fighting horn. And only | a i"8 \v generations of freedom suffice Ito 1 'ring out those horns again un- ! til they threaten like rapiers. Man j can; work wonders, but give nature j her opportunity and she can beat i hitt i readily at his own game, for iis :not her law th-> survival of the j fitt) est, the law that evolves 'ever I lino r specimens of the species ?— J "PJopular Science Siftings."