274 Modem Dogs. 



enthusiasts, led away to say things he cannot prove, 

 or, indeed, to lay claim to his hounds being de- 

 scended in a direct line from those animals which 

 may have or may not have killed the last wolf 

 near Dingle over 200 years ago. The gallant 

 gentleman acknowledges that the breed in its 

 original integrity has disappeared, but he believed, 

 when first writing on the subject twenty years since, 

 that so much of the true strain remained that, with 

 the aid of the modern deerhound, and with judicious 

 management, the breed in its "pristine grandeur" 

 could be recovered. 



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, 



