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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The resulting purity of the surface of the 

 streets would have an excellent aesthetic 

 effect upon the population, particularly on 

 those who live in the dirty streets, and 

 would prompt them to purify their own 

 homes, make them pleasant and adorn them 

 works from which they are now discour- 

 aged by the public filth that surrounds them, 

 and which they can not help. Other sani- 

 tary improvement would follow the general 

 adoption of these pavements, in the relief 

 from nervous disorders which would be 

 gained by the cessation of the noise of the 

 stone pavements and the worry from their 

 dust and joltings. " The time has come when 

 the sanitarian must extend his field even be- 

 yond mere physical causes of disease, and 

 look to the palliation of the effects of inces- 

 sant struggles and conflicts which a business 

 man of the present day must undergo. . . . 

 Quieting influences are worth almost any 

 price, and these should be sought and pro- 

 vided along with those which relate to phys- 

 ical health." 



Origin of Domestic Dogs. Professor 

 Huxley, in the second of two lectures on 

 dogs which he recently delivered at the 

 Royal Institution, examined the peculiari- 

 ties of the animals of the dog kind, and 

 pointed out that the only respect in which 

 the varieties presented any very great or 

 remarkable difference, apart from the color 

 of the skin or fur and other minor details, 

 was in the structure of the skull and in the 

 teeth. The form of dog which departed 

 most widely from the rest in its dentition 

 was the octocyon, a small, fox-like creature 

 belonging to South Africa, which had forty- 

 eight teeth, while other dogs had forty-two. 

 The dog-like animals might be divided into 

 two classes according to the peculiarities of 

 the skull those like the wolf, or the tho- 

 oids, having a great cavity over the brow 

 which causes the front to be prominent ; and 

 those like the fox, or the alopecoids, which 

 are without this cavity. This enabled them 

 to fix the position of the domestic dogs still 

 more definitely ; it would occupy a place in 

 the series corresponding with that in winch 

 they had put the jackals and wolves. With 

 regard to the stag-hound, the shepherd's 

 dog, and many of the cur-dogs, no one 

 would have the slightest hesitation in plac- 



ing them just between the wolf and the 

 jackal. Some domestic dogs had as large a 

 development of skull as the wolf, but the 

 appearance of sagacity it gave them could 

 not be depended upon, for it was often due 

 to the existence of the cavity. Speculating 

 upon the probable origin of the domestic 

 dog, Professor Huxley called attention to 

 the fact that, in Northwest America, the In- 

 dian dog was not really distinguishable from 

 the prairie-wolf. The domestication of these 

 animals was easily explicable when it was re- 

 membered that, although fierce enough when 

 stirred up, they were endowed with singular 

 curiosity, which attracted them particularly 

 toward man and his doings, and that, when 

 caught young and kindly treated, they soon 

 became as attached and devoted to their 

 masters as ordinary dogs. A domesticated 

 stock might thus have readily been pro- 

 duced. If this one domestic dog had origi- 

 nated in the taming by man of an indige- 

 nous wild animal, then the general problem of 

 the original taming of domestic dogs would 

 take this form : " Can we find wild stock so 

 similar to the existing dog that there is no 

 improbability in concluding them to be the 

 same animals ? " He thought we could. 

 We might trace dog-like animals farther 

 and farther west until, in northern Africa, 

 we had a whole series of kinds of such ani- 

 mals usually known as jackals, presenting 

 every conceivable gradation between the 

 characteristic of the dog and the charac- 

 teristic of the jackal. He believed these 

 wild stocks were the source whence, in each 

 region of the world, the savages who origi- 

 nally began to tame dogs had derived their 

 stock. This was confirmed by the latest ar- 

 chaeological evidence. The monuments of 

 ancient Egypt had preserved a great variety 

 of dogs, but it was an interesting fact that 

 the oldest monuments contained the small- 

 est number of varieties, and in the third 

 and fourth dynasties there were only two 

 well-marked forms of dogs one a small, 

 cur-like animal, resembling the one that 

 now haunted the streets of Cairo, and the 

 other of a form more like that of the grey- 

 hound. The cur was, no doubt, a tame spe- 

 cies of the wild jackal, which was still to 

 be found in the same country ; and, with re- 

 spect to the greyhound, there was in Abys- 

 sinia a very long-headed dog, which was very 





