HISTORICAL NOTES 23 



became a fine art, about 1690, the net was aban- 

 doned and the setter followed him as a gun dog. 

 Modern English setter history begins with Ed- 

 ward Laverack's book, ''The Setter," published 

 about 1835. By that time the breed, as we now 

 know it, had been well established from the setting 

 spaniel of 1600, and a number of notable strains 

 had been established by the sporting nobility of 

 England. In these latter days, after all the rum- 

 ble-bumble about Laveracks and Llewellins has 

 died down, it seems curious that those earnest con- 

 troversialists should have overlooked the fact that 

 Mr. Laverack did not have the only strain of Eng- 

 lish setters, but only one among many. There 

 are hundreds of thousands of setters to-day who 

 owe their descent to neither the Laverack nor the 

 Llewellin strain. True, Mr. Laverack did get up 

 a happy nick that gave him dogs which could 

 sweep all before them at the English field trials, 

 and so were in great demand, but he did not, in 

 the nature of things, produce from his two dogs 

 Ponto and Old Moll, more than a very small per- 

 centage of all the English setters in "blighty." 

 However, from these two came Pride of the Bor- 

 der and Countess, two notable dogs ; besides Dash, 

 Dash n. Old Blue and Fred IV. Between Ponto 

 and Dash II are six generations, thirty-nine years 



