The Gordon Setter 203 



Irish setter all over." He is wrong there, most undoubtedly, but this can 

 be explained by this quotation from Laverack: "The Rev. Mr. Hutchin- 

 son has as good a breed of black and tans as any one, being much lighter, 

 and not nearly as cumbersome as the ordinary class." Of course if you are 

 going to take light Gordons and somewhat heavily built Irish you will not 

 have much distinction of type, and that Gordons differed in those days is 

 unquestionable. Laverack describes them thus, in the next paragraph 

 to the foregoing quotation: "Black-tans, as a rule, have sour, coarse heads; 

 shoulders loaded, heavy and too upright; are heavy and thick-limbed; 

 large feet, often too straight and stilty in hind quarters; tail thick and ropy. 

 Many of the black tans have obstinate and stubborn tempers, and not par- 

 ticularly easy to break." Again he says: "They are longer in the leg 

 and looser in the loin, heavier and coarser in head, thicker in the neck, 

 more throaty than other breeds and not so clean made in the limbs or so 

 short in the back; neither are they so close in feet. Nevertheless, they 

 are very beautiful dogs, and I have seen many good black-tans, more par- 

 ticularly those of the lighter build." 



Mr. Laverack's knowledge of the setters at Gordon Castle has already 

 ■ been set forth in an earlier quotation, and he was also acquainted with the 

 setters of Major Douglas and Mr. Thompson, who kept their setters at 

 Broughton Ferry, near Dundee, and presumably of the same strain as those 

 of the Duke of Gordon, Lord Panmure and Admiral Wemyss. Laverack 

 thought it would be a good plan to cross with the Irish blood-red setter 

 to give them better heads and render them lighter and give them more 

 endurance, so that the Gordons or black and tans he knew could not have 

 been of the light type resembling Irish such as "Sixty-one" describes. 



In Captain Brown's "Anecdotes of Dogs" (Edinburgh, 1829), he 

 makes no mention of Gordons, nor of Irish either, for that matter, merely 

 giving a short description under the head of "The English Setter," and then 

 some anecdotes. One of these is from a letter from Mr. Torry, a resident 

 of Edinburgh, who furnished two or three of the anecdotes, and in the 

 one referred to he said: "The black and tanned small bitch which I 

 have was originally out of the Duke of Bedford's breed." He then told 

 of taking her at ten months old to the moors, and without a single training 

 lesson she pointed, backed and was staunch, and also retrieved a bird of 

 her own volition. "This happened in 1825." Mr. Torry also told about 

 a dog owned by a friend of his, "a rough brown setter, out of the shepherd's 



