198 Modern Dogs. 



The difficulty, to my mind, would be to exactly 

 define the original Irish wolfhound. The popular 

 idea and this is not always correct was of a 

 big powerful dog, with a wire-haired or rough coat, 

 built on the lines of a deerhound, but altogether a 

 heavier and stronger animal. What height a full- 

 grown specimen should be there is a diversity of 

 opinion. Old writers have said he was as big as 

 a donkey; others that he stood from 36 inches to 

 40 inches at the shoulders. In the museum of the 

 Royal Dublin Society there are two skulls of wolf- 

 hounds dug out of barrows by the late Dr. Wilde. 

 The dimensions of them have been very useful to 

 those who believed in the bigness of the wolf- 

 hound. Unfortunately for the side of the latter, 

 these skulls, when carefully measured and compared 

 with others of living dogs, deerhounds, wolfhounds, 

 and greyhounds, could not have been possessed 

 by animals more than 29 inches high at the 

 shoulders. 



However, it is not my province here to say what 

 kind of an animal the historical Irish deerhound was, 

 whether there were two, three, or four varieties, or 

 whether any dog that would tackle and hunt a wolf 

 was, from the moment he did so, called a wolf- 

 hound. This would only be similar to what occurs 

 in our own days ; for have we not the ordinary fox- 



