THE DOG 



I. Bond of Friendship between Man 

 AND Dog 



Buffon said and wrote, " The dog is the 

 friend of man." Though the works of that 

 writer, very learned in his time, no longer fill 

 the prominent shelves of our scientific libraries, 

 the vvords just quoted are to this day con- 

 firmed and established by reiterated proofs. 



How was this junction between the man 

 and the animal brought about, and why have 

 dogs, from the earliest antiquit}', so sepa- 

 rated themselves from other animals 

 that they have been in favor 

 with the " most civilized 

 creature of the earth," even 

 when the civilization of that 

 sovereign of creation still left 

 something, or to be more 

 frank, still left much to be 

 desired ? 



If we knew with certainty 

 whence the domestic dog 

 {ca/n's faniiliaris, the learned 

 call him) is descended, it 

 would be easier to answer 

 the above questions. But we 

 cannot as yet point with ab- 

 solute certaint)" to the animal 

 species with which man's 

 amicable ties were formed. 

 Perhaps it was a species of 

 wild dog now extinct ; perhaps wolves and 

 jackals had their share in the matter. 



Men of science in the olden time took \-ery 

 little interest in knowing whence our useful 

 domestic animals had descended. Though 

 most of them were not disposed to consider 

 Noah's ark as the cradle of all the species, 

 they did not delve much deeper into this inter- 

 esting problem. We may even say that the 

 study of the races of the domestic animals 



The Friend of Man 



extends back, at the most, half a century. It 

 is true that men like Belon (1554), Kampfer 

 (1712), Guldenstadt (1776), and Pallas (1776), 

 as well as Ehrenberg, Reichenbach, and others, 

 tried to throw some light upon the question, 

 which, however, was not cleared up until 1884. 

 About that year very interesting excavations 

 were made of prehistoric lake cities in Switzer- 

 land, which brought to light remains of animals, 

 chiefly dogs, older than any hitherto known 

 and recognized. 



Then, and especially after the pub- 

 lication of the masterpieces of 

 Darwin on "domestic ani- 

 mals and plants," scientific 

 men, like Yeiteless, Ruti- 

 meyer, and Naumann, con- 

 cerned themselves seriously 

 about the unknown ancestors 

 of the domestic dog. Alas ! 

 those ancestors had left no 

 other inheritance than a few 

 bones and broken skulls ; but 

 these remains, such as they 

 were, were minutely exam- 

 ined. The Austrian profes- 

 sor, L. H. Yeiteless, was so 

 enthusiastic in his work along 

 this line that he even dedi- 

 cated one of the skulls, found 

 near Olmiitz, to the memory 

 who had died in 1869, — 



of his mother 



"skull of canis tnatiis optimac!' 



Nevertheless, in spite of minute researches, 

 no certainty has yet been attained as to the 

 origin of the domestic dog. We can still make 

 only suppositions, and these attribute the pater- 

 nity of the race, in the first instance, to the 

 jackal and a species of Indian wolf. We can- 

 not therefore know with certainty what animal 

 species it was that, in its primitive state, first 



