NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DOG. 87 



deer her recognised emblem, from among her animated 

 tribes, celebrated and extolled by all authors and lovers of 

 natural history, native and foreign, and of universal i'amc in 

 his own country has been long ranked in peerless dignity, 

 " facile princeps," at the head of the whole dog family. 

 When the noble dogs of Greece and of India were at the 

 height of their renown among the ancients, those of Erin 

 were not as yet known, though they soon afterwards obtained 

 celebrity. The dogs of Greece appear to have had a strange 

 and mysterious affinity with those of the West. Those ot 

 India have disappeared from our knowledge, and baffled our 

 research, though they, too, probably shared in this affinity, 

 through, perhaps, the often-proposed medium of the Phoeni- 

 cians, or through that of the* Phocsean colony from Asia 

 Minor, (see Herodotus.) Marsilia, in Gaul, the modern 

 Marseilles, (see Moore.) Many derivations of the name 

 greyhound have been suggested, and among others great 

 hound grey-hound, (from color.) My own impression is, 

 that the true one is Greek hound, grains, and we have rea- 

 son to believe that to that country we are indebted for the 

 race. 



The great pint at issue relative to the natural history of 

 the Irish wolf-dog, may be stated as being whether he be- 

 longed to the greyhound race, or was of more robust form, 

 approaching that of the mastilf. There are, indeed, indi- 

 viduals who, without a shadow of ground on which to base 

 their opinions, deem him to have been a mongrel, bred be- 

 tween mastitr and greyhound, &c. Of this last-mentioned 

 theory, as it has no fact or authority of any sort to support 

 it, I shall, of course, say nothing more especially as no 

 such proof is attempted by the advocates of this very singular 

 opinion. 



In support of the mastiff* doctrine, we have one single 

 modern authority if, indeed, authority it can be called. 

 About fifty years ago, the late Aylmer Burke Lambert, Esq., 

 read a paper before the Linnoean Society, subsequently pub- 

 lished in the third volume of that Society's Transactions, de- 

 scriptive of some dogs in possession of Lord Altamont, son of 

 the Marquis of Sligo, and stated to have been the old Irish 

 wolf-dog. The dog described and figured by Mr. Lambert 

 is a middling-sized and apparently not very well-bred speci- 



* I employ the term mastiff only for brevity, and for the sake of direct 

 antagonism to the greyhound doctrine. 



