The Maltese Terrier. 429 



rather than describe, and I ventured to offer the opinion that he really 

 was describing the true, though diminutive, spaniel of his time, and had 

 got his historical recollections mixed up with his facts of the day. I 

 think it is not at all unlikely that there existed in England toy dogs 

 from the Mediterranean of the type we now recognise as the Maltese, and 

 that the learned doctor was not sufficient of " a fancier " to discriminate 

 the minute differences between one toy and another. 



Strabo, who, so far as I am aware, was the earliest writer to refer 

 specially to these toys, does not give Malta as the native place of these 

 dogs, but, on the contrary, writes as follows : " There is a town in Sicily 

 called Melita, whence are exported many beautiful dogs, called Canes 

 Melitei. They were the peculiar favourites of the women; but now 

 (A.D. 25) there is less account made of these animals, which are not 

 bigger than common ferrets or weasels, yet they are not small in their 

 understanding nor unstable in their love." 



Strabo must have been wanting in the organ of comparativeness, or 

 the weasels of his time were of Brobdignagian proportions compared 

 with ours ; but the point is if Melita, in Sicily, was the birthplace of 

 the Maltese so-called dog, why ascribe its origin to the island of 

 Malta P 



As I have said, every English writer I have consulted seems to have 

 taken it for granted that the dog we call Maltese originally came from 

 Malta, but not one offers the slightest proof in support of the assump- 

 tion. It would be needless to go through the works of these writers 

 seriatim. From "Idstone" I should have expected something more accu- 

 rate and scholarly than the slovenly article he has given in his book, and 

 coming to " Stonehenge " I am aghast with wonder and amazement. He 

 seems to have lost his compass, and at the mercy of wind and tide goes 

 see-sawing between Malta and Manilla those wide extremes a hopeless 

 wreck out of whose hull we cannot get any cargo worth landing. 



In his earliest work on the dog he describes the breed as nearly extinct, 

 but, although " scarce, still to be obtained in Malta." He, however, in 

 the same work gave an engraving of a dog, as a Maltese, imported from 

 Manilla. In " The Dogs of the British Islands," still hankering after 

 Malta as their birthplace, he confesses his inability "to trace any records 

 of the dog, after many inquiries made amongst residents in Maltft." 

 Well, if Strabo is right this is not to be wondered at any more than 



