What is a Collie? 21 



But what is a collie ? ask my readers, and why the name, 

 and why not the older one of shepherd's dog? The 

 derivation of this same word has excited the curiosity of 

 many writers, leading them into the troubles of research 

 with about as much result as has been reached as to the 

 origin of the dog itself. Until within recent years the word 

 collie was used in conjunction with the word dog, thus 

 your friend owned a collie dog or a Scotch collie dog, as the 

 case might be. A collie dog was just a dog used in 

 connection with a " collie," a variety of sheep common to 

 Scotland, and which the Dictionary of Husbandry, published 

 in 1743, spelling it colley, describes as " such sheep as 

 have black faces and legs. The wool of these sheep is 

 very harsh with hairs, and not so white as other sheep." 

 Shakespere uses the word collie in one or two places, with 

 a similar meaning of blackened or darkened, thus in the 

 first scene of the first act of " A Midsummer Night's 

 Dream," Lysander speaks to Hermia thus : 



Brief as the lightning in the collied night. 



and in " Othello " the passage occurs : 



Having my best judgment collied. 



Blackened or darkened the word, now quite obsolete, 

 means; derived from the Anglo-Saxon "col," black; and so 

 the black-faced and black-legged sheep came to be called 

 " colleys," and the dogs that drove them colley dogs. In 

 due course the word dog was dropped, and as the name of 

 this Scotch sheep was discontinued, so far as they were con- 

 cerned it became usurped by a variety of the canine race, 

 and what was once a sheep, by this odd process of trans- 

 formation became a dog. So, in fact, only by custom and 

 privilege is the collie a dog. The former, too, might be 



