DOGS AND MASTERS. 183 



High Asia. But at least as early as the days 

 of the Danish shell-mounds, perhaps thou- 

 sands of years earlier, man had learned to 

 tame the dog- and to employ him as a friend 

 or servant for his own purposes. Those dogs 

 which best served the ends of man were pre- 

 served and increased ; those which followed 

 too much their own original instincts were 

 destroyed or at least discouraged. The 

 savage hunter would be very apt to fling his 

 stone axe at the skull of a hound which tried 

 to eat the game he had brought down with 

 his flint-tipped arrow, instead of retrieving it : 

 he would be most likely to keep carefully and 

 feed well on the refuse of his own meals the 

 hound which aided him most in surprising, 

 killing, and securing his quarry. Thus there 

 sprang up between man and the dog a mutual 

 and ever increasing sympathy which on the 

 part of the dependent creature has at last be- 

 come organised into an inherited instinct. If 

 we could only thread the labyrinth of a dog's 

 brain, we should find somewhere in it a group 



