114 ACQUIRED CHARACTERS sec. 



hearing — an acute perception of sound is no longer so necessary 

 as in the natural state. But the reason why these dogs begin 

 to erect the tail and carry it upriglit, wliile the ancestral 

 jackal, like the wolf, carries it lianging down, is not so easy 

 to discover, although the fact could scarcely be explained as 

 a case of adaptation.-^ As a rule, the Constantinople dogs re- 

 tain not merely the exact shape of the jackal, the pointed 

 head, the narrow body, etc., but also the brownish yellow 

 ground colour, although they are spotted with black, or black 

 and wdiite. Occasionally, however, the black or white 

 becomes preponderant — dogs imiforndy black have come 

 under my notice, especially on the Asiatic side of the 

 Bosphorus, in Scutari. 



In a journey through Eoumelia and Bulgaria over the 

 Balkans — from Constantinople to Adrianople, Philippopolis, 

 Sophia, and thence to Lom-Palanka on the Danube — 1 was 

 able to trace, I may say step by step, a transformation of the 

 brown, somewhat spotted jackal-dog into an ordinary domes- 

 tic dog, which is at first like the Pomeranian breed, with a 

 sliort compressed body and tail rolled up, and which, in con- 

 sequence of better nourishment, is large and strong, and more 

 uniformly coloured, most often white. The farther one passes 

 into Christian re<^ions — that is, the more the dog becomes a 

 house animal, the more does he show this transformation, of 

 which a great part is undoubtedly due to better nourishment — 

 in other words, to directly acquired and inherited characters. 



I have to remark further that through these observations, 

 and through the study of ancient monuments, particularly of 

 those of the tombs in Athens, where the departed are con- 

 stantly represented with their favourite dogs, I have reached 

 the conviction that the Pomeranian is a breed directly derived 

 from the jackal, and must be considered one of the most 

 ancient breeds. All the dogs on those Greek monuments are 



^ See a subsequent passage. 



