646 THE DOG. 



do not communicate the information necessary to enable the 

 naturalist to recognize the species. 



The term Wolf, it has been said, is merely employed to 

 designate the larger and fiercer Canidse, though it appears to 

 have been employed in a more extensive sense by the ancients, 

 and to have included various species which we should now 

 rather term Wild Dogs. The less fierce and powerful mem- 

 bers of the group are yet more numerous in species than the 

 wolves, so called. They are the inhabitants especially of the 

 warmer or temperate countries ; are generally more limited 

 with respect to range of place than the larger wolves, and 

 less ferocious and sanguinary, though not always more ready 

 to resign themselves to domestication. Yet they all appear 

 to be possessed of this same faculty, and some of them to have 

 been domesticated from early times, contributing to give us 

 those smaller and gentler varieties of the domestic dogs with 

 which we are familiar, and, being mingled in blood with the 

 other members of the family, to produce, under the various 

 agencies affecting them in the subjugated state, that end- 

 less variety which characterizes the community of domes- 

 tic dogs, and which no other hypothesis but that of a differ- 

 ent descent can explain. 



Of the Wild Dogs of a former age, and yet existing in the 

 state of liberty, one is the Cams anthus of Frederick Cuvier, 

 the Deeb of the Arabs. This dog was regarded by the an- 

 cients as a wolf, and still inhabits the Deserts bordering on 

 the Nile. He is about 16 inches high at the shoulder, and 

 measures from the nose to the tail about 2^ feet. He greatly 

 resembles many of the dogs or wolves sculptured on the an- 

 cient monuments of Egypt ; and may be reasonably supposed 

 to have been one of the species from which this early people 

 derived their domesticated races. A head, taken from the 

 catacombs of Lycopolis, the City of Wolves, is supposed, by 

 the traveller Riippel, to be of this species ; and with respect 

 to the Egyptian dogs, as they are generally represented on 



