made bread of the residue, and it was under her attention that a southern grass was developed into what we know as Indian corn.  Looking back on this process, we call it the domestication of plants, and we are likely to regard it as a more conscious process than it really was.  It was the result of her conversion to her own uses of the most available portion of her environment.  In view of her physiological habit, the animal environment was, for the most part, out of the question, and her attention was of necessity directed to the plant side.  While less remunerative in its beginnings than the animal side of the process, it was, perhaps, at all times less precarious and uncertain, and we find in consequence that the economic dependence of man on woman is as evident as her dependence on him.  A dinner of herbs is a humbler resort than a roast of antelope, but there was less doubt that it would be forthcoming, and primitive man was often, when in hard luck, dependent on the activities of his wife, or the females of the group.

The domestication of animals appears similarly to be the following-up by man of his connections with animal life, when this life began to be less abundant.  It is probable that the practice originated in the habit of taking the young of animals home as pets, and there is apparently a point of difference between the attention of the men and the women given to animals once taken into the household.  The men were interested in these animals as reviving in memory the emotional situations of hunting life, and also in the clever and inimitable accuracy of co-ordination and superhuman development of sense-perceptions, while there was always in the attitude of woman toward these animals a touch of maternal feeling, such as is still expended on the “harmless, necessary cat.”  And, in a small way, woman also contributed to the domestication of animals by giving them suck, partly as an economic investment.  In Tahiti and New Britain, for example, the women suckle the pigs, and the old women feed them.[175] Aside from this, the connections which primitive woman has with animal life is very slight.  Worms and insects, shellfish, and even fish she may capture, but but after this her relation to animal life is in caring for the flesh and skins turned over to her by the man.

It was a very general early practice that, when man had killed his game and brought it home, he was not concerned in the further handling of it.  He did not, indeed, in all cases bring it home, but sent his wife after it.  The Indians killed buffalo only as fast as the squaws could cut them up and care for the meat, and the men of the Eskimos would not draw the seal from the water after spearing it.  Exhausted by extraordinary efforts, the man may well have left the dressing of the animal upon occasion to his wife, and, exhausted or not, he soon fell into the habit of doing so.  It thus turns out that all labors relating to the preparation of food, and to the utilizations of the side-products of food stuffs, are apt to be found in the hands of the women.