ORIGIN OF THE DOG. 5 



and therefore as population spread in Europe the wild canines 

 would get exterminated, and the opinion has been advanced, 

 and not without reasonable data, that the very wolves that 

 infested Britain, were not of the same species as the Conti- 

 nental wolf (which would have been more than a match for 

 the w r olf dog of Ireland) but were in reality a wild dog, and 

 possibly the wild aborigine from which when crossed with the 

 Celtic greyhound of Gaul, arose the Irish wolf greyhound, 

 which so assisted in their extermination. 



Col. H. Smith ( Nat. Library vol. ix) suggests that a lost 

 or undiscovered species, allied to the canis tricolor or hyaena 

 venatica of Burchell, was the source of the short muzzled and 

 strong jawed races of primitive mastiffs, and again he says, 

 in one group of domestic dogs however, there is one bearing 

 evidence of a much greater departure from the general simi- 

 larity a departure leading to a strong presumption that the 

 typical animal was taken from an aberrant species, one nearly 

 approximating the hyaena and allied to canis tricolor or Pictus 

 Author. The group is that of our mastiff and bulldog. But 

 Col. H. Smith as well as other naturalists have seemingly 

 overlooked the fact that the indigenous mastiff of Britain and 

 Gaul had probably a wild prototype, long since extinct, and 

 the idiocratic temperament of the English mastiff and bulldog 

 is very favourable to such a theory. 



In still further refutation of the lupine ancestry of the dog 

 may be instanced the early distinct mention of the animal 

 from the wolf in various countries, in Egypt we find that the 



t Aristotle mentions the division of animals into domestic and wild, 

 which theory though adopted by some naturalists, is defective, as the 

 horse dog, etc., that lived in the woods, did not differ specifically from 

 the domestic. Vide Aribfc de part Am" Lib 1. C, 3. t, 1. p, 972. 



