We observe a clear allusion to this distinction between the principal uses of sheep and of goats in the twenty-seventh chapter of the book of Proverbs[369]. The management and use of goats has from time immemorial formed a striking feature in the condition of man, and especially of those nations which belong to the Caucasian, or, as Dr. Prichard more properly denominates it, the _Iranian_ or _Indo-Atlantic_ variety of our race[370]. Their habits of sheep-breeding seem no less characteristic than the form of their countenances, a no less essential part of their manner of life than any other custom, by which they are distinguished: and, as all the circumstances, which throw any light upon the question, conspire to render it probable, that the above-mentioned variety of the human race first inhabited part of the high land of central Asia, so it is remarkable, that our domestic sheep and goats may with the greatest probability be referred to the same stock with certain wild animals, which now overspread those regions. The sheep, as has been already observed in chapter I., is regarded as specifically the same with 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[371]. 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. [369] “Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. The lambs are for thy clothing, and the goats are the price of thy field; and thou shalt have goats’ milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy household, and for the maintenance of thy maidens.” Prov. xxvii. 23, 26, 27. Bochart has quoted a great variety of ancient testimonies to the value of goats’-milk in his Hierozoicon, l. ii. cap. 51. pp. 629, 630. ed. Leusden. [370] See Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, third edition, vol. i. pp. 247. 257-262. 303, 304. These nations are characterized by the _oval_ form of the skull. Their distribution over the face of the earth may be seen in the Map, Plate VII.