36 THE BRITISH MASTIFF. 



The Phoenician traders would have to cater for the taste 

 and cupidity of our barbarous forefathers, who amounted to 

 little better than savages (the "Hospitibus feros Brittannos" 

 of Horace, Lib, iii. ode iv.~32) although the community of 

 wives and incestuous and unnatural alliances imputed to them 

 by Caesar and Diodorus, I opine were unfounded, having 

 arisen probably from the practice of several families sleeping 

 in one common apartment or hovel, as was still continued by 

 many of the Welsh until quite recent times without any 

 sacrifice of morality. 



Hovpver the Phoenician traders would have to bring arti- 

 cles fur exchange calculated to suit the taste of their British 

 producers of tin, and what more likely, than seeing the 

 courageous but somewhat undersized pugnaces or fighting 

 dogs, owned by the Britons (as mentioned by Gratius and 

 Arrian) that they should bring as an article of barter some of 

 the larger pugnaces or mastiffs of Asia, of which modern 

 scholarship and research renders it presumable they would be 

 fully cognizant of. 



Of the Phoenician colonization from Carthage, and voyages 

 through the straits of Gibraltar as far as Alfionn (i.e. Albion) 

 and lerne (i.e. Ireland) notice has been preserved under the 

 'voyages of Himilco and the Periplus or voyage of Hanno, 

 the latter been recorded to have settled seven colonies on the 

 Continent towards Britain. The date of the latter voyage is 

 estimated to have been about 550 B.C. The Carthaginian 

 intercourse with their mother country Tyre, whose trading 

 with Assyria was intimate, would fully account for the 

 Carthaginian Phoenicians knowledge and possession of the 

 Assyrian mastiff, which we see was known 640 years B.C., 

 during the reign of Sardanapalus. And from a small work 



