462 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



Judging from the numerous shell-heap remains of what seems to be 

 this same dog, it was formerly common among the New England 

 Indians. In Hakluyt's Voyages (Ever^y-man's Library ed., 6, p. 95) 

 is an account of The voyage of the ship called the Marigold of Mr. 

 Hill of Redrife unto Cape Briton and beyond to the latitude of 44 

 degrees and an half, 1593. The narrator tells of meeting with a 

 party of " Savages" at Cape Breton in July, who upon the accidental 

 discharge of a musket, came " running right up o\er the bushes with 

 great agilitie and swiftnesse. . .with white staves in their handes 

 like halfe pikes, and their dogges of colour blacke not so bigge as a 

 grej'hounde followefl them at their heeles; but wee retired unto our 

 boate." 



It is probably to this breed of dog that Charle^'oix refers in his 

 Journal of a voyage to North America (London, 2 vols, 17(U, transl.). 

 "The Indians," he writes, "always carry a great number of dogs with 

 them in their huntings; these are the only domestick animals they 

 breed, and that too only for hunting; they appear to be all of one 

 species, with upright ears, and a long snout like that of a wolf " 

 (1, p. 187). 



This is the "major" type of Indian dog reported by Loomis and 

 Young (1912) from Maine shell-heaps, where rather large-sized speci- 

 mens have been discovered. Dog-remains have been found also in 

 Connecticut (MacCurdy, 1914) and Block Island, R. I. (Eaton, 1898). 



An Indian Dog-skvill (Plate 7) collected by Kennicott on the Peel 

 River, about 1860 (U. S. N. M. 6,219) is hardly different, except for 

 its very slightly greater size, and seems best referred to the same sort 

 of dog, though possibly a distinguishable breed. Richardson (1829) 

 named this dog Canis familiaris var. canadensis, and says it is the 

 kind "most generally cultivated by the native tribes of Canada and 

 the Fur countries." He describes it as intermediate in size and form 

 l)etween the Eskimo and the Hare-Indian Dog. Its fur is black and 

 gray, mixed with white; some are all black. Apparently identical 

 with the skull from Peel River is another collected by Dr. W. H. Dall, 

 from a prehistoric Aleut village site in Unalaska. Dr. Dall notes that 

 this is the only dog-skull which had been found in the undeniably 

 prehistoric kitchen-middens of the Aleutian Islands. It still retains 

 the upper carnassial, which measures 20.5 mm. in length. The 

 occipital condyles are 38 mm. across. The first upper premolar was 

 apparently lacking. 



Probably it was a dog of this breed that Audubon figured as. the 

 Hare-Indian Dog, from a living one in the gardens of the Zoological 



