THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew. In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the knowledge of good and evil? The early Iranians must have broken off from the united body of the Aryans at a time when they spoke a common language, which though not Sanscrit, was very like it. The affinities between Sanscrit and the dialect called with irremediable inaccuracy “Zend” are of the strongest. From this we conclude that, on their establishment in their new home, the Iranians differed little from the race of whose customs the Rig-Veda gives—not a full picture—but a faithful outline. Pastoral folk, devoted to their flocks and herds, but not unlearned in the cultivation of the earth and the sowing of grain, they had reached what may be called the highest stage of primitive civilisation. Though milk, butter and cooked corn formed their principal food, on feast days they also ate meat, chiefly the flesh of oxen and buffaloes, which they were careful to cook thoroughly. The progressive Aryans, who called half-raw meat by a term exactly corresponding to the too familiar “rosbif saignant,” denounced the more savage peoples who consumed it as “wild men” or “demons.” They kept horses, asses and mules; horses were sacrificed occasionally; for instance, kings sacrificed a horse to obtain male issue. The wild boar was hunted, if not in the earliest, at least in very early times. The dog was prized for its fidelity as guardian of the house and flocks, but there is no trace of its having been protected by extraordinary regulations such as those which later came into force in Iran. On the other hand, the name of dog had never yet been used in reproach. It seems to have been among Semitic races that the contempt for man’s best friend arose, but it is morally certain that it arose nowhere till dogs became scavengers of cities. It was the homeless pariah cur that gave the dog the bad name from which have sprung so many ugly words registered in modern vocabularies. Even now, when Jew or Moslem uses “dog” in a bad sense, he means “cur”; he knows quite well the other kind of dog—he knows Tobit’s dog, which, bounding on before the young man and the angel, told the glad tidings of his master’s return; Tobit’s dog which was one of the animals admitted by Mohammed into highest heaven. But “pariah dog” became synonymous of pariah, and notwithstanding the present tendency to attribute the opprobrium of the pig to original sanctity (and consequent reservation), I am inclined to think that the pig likewise came to be scorned because he was a scavenger. In some Indian cities herds of wild