CHAPTER II. 

 THE BULL TERRIER. 



OUR modern bull terrier is a very different creature 

 from what he was half a century ago, and I 

 know there are some old " dog fanciers " who 

 prefer the brindled and white and fawn or fallow 

 smut dogs, that were so often kept in our grand- 

 fathers' days, to the " milk-white " animals now seen 

 on our show benches. 



There is little or no doubt that the original bull 

 terrier was a cross between an ordinary kind of 

 terrier and the bull dog, and some of the largest 

 specimens had a touch of the mastiff thrown in. He 

 had been bred for fighting or for killing rats, and, 

 long before the era of canine exhibitions, some of 

 the rougher so-called sporting men in London and 

 in the Midlands, of which Birmingham may be 

 taken as the metropolis, had strains of more or less 

 celebrity. The dogs that fought with Wombwell's 

 lions at Warwick in 1825 were large bull terriers, 

 and not bull dogs, as stated in the journals of that 



