302 Modern Dogs. 



and fought and robbed before and during Caius's 

 time never owned a dog of any kind that could not 

 be made useful. This could never be the case with 

 the modern Skye terrier, with his long coat and 

 shaggy head. In the sixteenth century, and earlier, 

 there was, no doubt, a Scottish terrier, but he was the 

 " die hard " of the present day rather than the Skye. 

 In proof of this one of the leading writers on dogs so 

 recently as 1881 confounds the two varieties, so 

 far as to give us an excellent illustration of a hard- 

 haired Scottish terrier which he is fain to call a 

 Skye terrier. Perhaps the learned writer, Hugh 

 Dalziel, is not so much to blame for this as the 

 person who led him into the error, which was, of 

 course, rectified in later editions. I mention this 

 in order to show that even in modern times it 

 were possible for confusion to be caused between 

 the Skye terrier, which is quite a recently manu- 

 factured variety, and the Scottish terrier, which I 

 have said in an earlier chapter is probably the oldest 

 of all varieties of Scotia's dogs. 



Between 1870 and 1880 a number of letters 

 appeared in the Field newspaper, in which interested 

 writers, as they did later on, tried to make out that 

 there were several strains of these Skye terriers; but 

 again they mixed up the die hards, and the more 

 they wrote the more confusion was caused. Nor did 



