It is a fact familiar to all travellers, that savages frequently capture young animals of various kinds, and rear them as favourites, and sell or present them as curiosities.  Human nature is generally akin:  savages may be brutal, but they are not on that account devoid of our taste for taming and caressing young animals; nay, it is not improbable that some races may possess it in a more marked degree than ourselves, because it is a childish taste with us; and the motives of an adult barbarian are very similar to those of a civilised child.

In proving this assertion, I feel embarrassed with the multiplicity of my facts.  I have only space to submit a few typical instances, and must, therefore, beg it will be borne in mind that the following list could be largely reinforced.  Yet even if I inserted all I have thus far been able to collect, I believe insufficient justice would be done to the real truth of the case.  Captive animals do not commonly fall within the observation of travellers, who mostly confine themselves to their own encampments, and abstain from entering the dirty dwellings of the natives; neither do the majority of travellers think tamed animals worthy of detailed mention.  Consequently the anecdotes of their existence are scattered sparingly among a large number of volumes.  It is when those travellers are questioned who have lived long and intimately with savage tribes that the plenitude of available instances becomes most apparent.

I proceed to give anecdotes of animals being tamed in various parts of the world, at dates when they were severally beyond the reach of civilised influences, and where, therefore, the pleasure taken by the natives in taming them must be ascribed to their unassisted mother-wit.  It will be inferred that the same rude races who were observed to be capable of great fondness towards animals in particular instances, would not unfrequently show it in others.

[North America.]—­The traveller Hearne, who wrote towards the end of the last century, relates the following story of moose or elks in the more northern parts of North America.  He says:—­

“I have repeatedly seen moose at Churchill as tame as sheep and even more so....  The same Indian that brought them to the Factory had, in the year 1770, two others so tame that when on his passage to Prince of Wales’s Fort in a canoe, the moose always followed him along the bank of the river; and at night, or on any other occasion when the Indians landed, the young moose generally came and fondled on them, as the most domestic animal would have done, and never offered to stray from the tents.”

Sir John Richardson, in an obliging answer to my inquiries about the Indians of North America, after mentioning the bison calves, wolves, and other animals that they frequently capture and keep, said:—­

“It is not unusual, I have heard, for the Indians to bring up young bears, the women giving them milk from their own breasts.”