The Mastiff 557 



eign dogs and also what were called boarhounds were taller than the English 

 dogs seems to be conceded by Wynn; and he emphasises time and again 

 that Thompson's breeding for a moderate-sized dog with a heavy body and 

 short head was correct, and that Lukey's ideas of size were wrong. 



Another illustration which is rather a shock to believers in the "exclus- 

 ively English" of the mastiff is Buffon's ^^dogue de forte race. " At first sight 

 it looks like our friend the Bewick mastiff but it was published in Paris nearly 

 fifty years before the Bewick engraving. Buffon says that this "dog of the 

 strong race ' ' was a cross between the dogue and the matin. The dogue was 

 the bulldog, and he mentions it as the dog of England which had been im- 

 ported into France. But he says that it did not thrive there well, and that 

 the cross between the matin and the imported English dogue and between it 

 and the petit Danois, which respectively were the "dog of the strong race" 

 and the pug, succeeded better, adding that the "dog of the strong race" was 

 also much larger than the dogue of England. The contribution of M. 

 Daubenton is to the effect that the "dog of the strong race" much resembled 

 the pure dogue but was much larger and that was the reason for its name. 

 This increase in size being due to the cross with the matin and with the Great 

 Dane. It was of the same proportions as the dogue, but was longer and 

 larger in muzzle, and its lips were thicker and more pendulous. 



Thus far there has been considerable groping along a very indistinct 

 path, but we can now make use of a broad thoroughfare of knowledge. Mr. 

 Wynn was a man of indefatigable research, and when it comes to facts he 

 could obtain first-hand he let nothing interfere in getting them from the 

 parent source. In respect to the record of what he names the re- 

 suscitation of the mastiff his history of the breed is invaluable, but we 

 cannot give all we would like to extract from it, for it teems with historical 

 facts for the last seventy pages. 



The extraordinary thing, which he clearly proves, although he does not 

 know it, is that we owe our mastiff to a few obscurely picked up dogs of un- 

 known origin and from others that were either half-bred Great Danes or dogs 

 known as Alpine mastiffs, that being the name for the St. Bernard about 

 1820, though Captain Brown called it the Alpine spaniel. If the dogs Mr. 

 Wynn found out anything about were Alpine mastiffs or half-bred-Danes, 

 what are we to suppose that the strays and stolen dogs were ^ Are we to accept 

 them as all absolutely bred from old stock for type and character, or are we 

 to say: "If these dogs that are traceable either from knowledge of breeding 



