22 DOMESTICATED HUNTING-DOGS. 



inches ; running weight, 85 lbs. ; colour, red or fawn, with black 

 muzzle. To these external qualifications were added great speed 

 and strength, combined with endurance and courage, while the 

 sagacity and docility of the dog made him doubly valuable. He 

 was used for coursing the deer, but his nose was good enough for 

 hunting, even a cold scent, as was the case with all of his breed. 

 Whether or not the deerhound can now be procured in a state of 

 purity I am not prepared to say, but that they are extremely 

 rare is above dispute, though there are numberless animals re- 

 sembling them in form, but all more or less crossed with the 

 foxhound, bloodhound, bulldog, &c., and consequently not abso- 

 lutely pure. Mr. Scrope himself, with all his advantages, could 

 not succeed in obtaining any, and had recourse to the cross of 

 the greyhound with the foxhound, which, he says, answered par- 

 ticularly well ; as, according to his experience, " you get the 

 speed of the greyhound with just enough of the nose of the 



foxhound to answer your purpose In point of shape they 



resemble the greyhound, but they are larger in the bone and 

 shorter in the leg. Some of them, when in slow action, carry the 

 tail over the back like the pure foxhound ; their dash in making a 

 cast is most beautiful, and they stand all sorts of rough weather." 

 (p. 314.) He advises that the first cross only should be employed, 

 fearing that, as in some other instances, the ultimate results of 

 breeding back to either strain, or of going on with the two crosses, 

 would be unsatisfactory, " Maida," the celebrated deerhound be- 

 longing to Sir Walter Scott, was a cross of the grej^hound with the 

 bloodhound, but some distance off the latter. The bulldog in- 



