Toy Spaniels. 397 



The italics are mine, as I wish to emphasise Harrison's words for a 

 reason which will presently disclose itself. Harrison admittedly merely 

 quoted Cains, and, by inference, I shonld say from the Latin text in 

 which Caius's book on English dogs was originally written; although 

 Abraham Fleming's English translation of Caius's book,* printed in 

 London,. 1576, two years before the death of Caius, was open to him. 



Now, according to Fleming, the description of the toy spaniel given by 

 Caius runs, " these puppies the smaller they be the more pleasure they 

 provoke;" but in Harrison's quotation, after the words "the smaller they 

 be," the following important words appear, "and, thereto, if they have an 

 hole in the fore parts of their heads the better are they accepted." 



Whether Fleming overlooked and omitted this sentence in his transla- 

 tion, or Harrison interpolated it, I am unable to say ; but it is just 

 possible that Caius himself had omitted the mention of this point of 

 importance, and that Harrison supplied the omission from his own know- 

 ledge of the fashionable toys of the period. Be that as it may, " the 

 hole in the fore part of the head," which we now call "the stop," is 

 eminently a characteristic of our modern toy spaniels, and it goes far to 

 prove that the toys of Queen Elizabeth's time were true spaniels, and not 

 Maltese dogs, as Harrison says, inaccurately quoting Caius, who gives 

 Callemachus as his authority for calling them Meliteos, and giving 

 Malta as the place where they had their principal beginning. 



Caius, throughout his book, more fully describes the character of each 

 breed than the differences in their physical features, of which he only 

 gives us glimpses ; and in inveighing against some of the practices of the 

 "dainty dames" who indulged in luxury these "pretty, proper, and 

 fyne" "instruments of folly," charged both the ladies and their dogs as 

 Sybaritical ; and as strict accuracy is not so marked a feature in Caius's 

 book as a readiness on the part of the writer to be content with hearsay 

 evidence, even on points which the most gullible might be expected to 

 question, it is probable, I think, that the natural association of ideas 

 had more to do with his favouring the ascription of Malta as the original 

 home of those pets than any proof he had in favour of it. 



I am disposed to think that not only is this special feature the indenta- 

 tion, or stop, in the forehead strong presumptive evidence in favour of 



* " Englishe Dodges, by Johannes Caius, done into English, by Abraham 

 Fleming, 1576," a reprint of which, exact in every particular, ia now published at 

 170, Strand. 



