6gz The Dog Book 



believe that they belong to the family of poodles, and to that of the spaniels, 

 as shown by the shape of the body and the coat and colour. " 



Caius in the third section of his treatise of English dogs gives but one 

 breed, or one description for what we classify as toy dogs. He says of them 

 that they were the "delicate, neat, and pretty kind of dogges called the 

 Spaniel gentle, or the comforter, in Latin Melitaeus or Fotor." The word 

 comforter was afterward applied to toy spaniels and as there were evidently 

 plenty of these toy dogs' in the time of Caius, the presumption is that his use 

 of Melitaeus as the name for all of them is incorrect. He was evidently 

 writing of Spaniels of the toy order and not of the dog we know as the Mal- 

 tese, or what was after his time called the shock dog. 



Of the early writers of the last century we find Youatt gives Strabo's 

 description of the Maltese dog, and later on there is a paragraph regarding 

 the shock dog and he very erroneously says that Buffbn made the state- 

 ment that the head was that of the pug, the eyes large, the head round and 

 the tail curved and bent forward. As we have just given the Buffon de- 

 scription it will be seen that Youatt was entirely wrong. In Captain 

 Brown's "Anecdotes" he mentions both the shock dog and the comforter 

 as separate breeds, but in such a manner as to leave it quite an open question 

 as to what they were. We have seen an engraving of a small dog, bearing 

 marked resemblance to a toy spaniel which was entitled "The Comforter," 

 and the probability is that the name was used very much in olden days as 

 we use the term "toy." 



How nearly our Maltese dogs approach the original dog of Malta is 

 pure conjecture. The island was small enough to have ensured some con- 

 centration of effort along certain lines, such as we see in Jersey cattle; a 

 local fancy, which was fostered as remunerative on account of the dogs being 

 distinct from those bred elsewhere. There is very little evidence to show 

 that our dogs had any connection with those which originated on the island 

 and it seems more likely that the English stock came from France. They 

 have never been at all common and if it had not been for Mr. R. Mandeville 

 of London it is probable we would not have had any Maltese dog. The 

 starting point in the breed seems to have been a dog called Fido, owned by 

 a man named Tupper. Mr. Mandeville bred his Lilly to this Fido and got 

 a Fido of his own. He also bred Fan to Tupper's dog and got still another 

 Fido, after which he bred from these Fidos and stuck to the name so that 

 in the first stud book we have five of the same name all owned by him and 



