R. BROWN ON THE MAMMALS OF GREENLAND. 19 



the last buffalo is shot. It is impossible for him to drag home the 

 seals, sharks, white whales, or narwhals which he may have shot 

 in the winter at the " strom-holes " in the ice without his dogs 

 — or for the wild native in the far north to make his long mi- 

 grations, with his family and household goods, from one hunting- 

 ground to another without these domestic animals of his. Yet 

 that sad event seems to be not far distant. About fifteen years 

 ago, a curious disease, the nature of which has puzzled veteri- 

 narians, appeared among the Arctic dogs, from high up in Smith's 

 Sound down the whole coast of Greenland to Jakobshavn (69° 13' 

 N. lat.), where the ice-fjord stops it from going further south ; 

 and the government uses every endeavour to stop its spread 

 beyond that barrier, by preventing the native dogs north and 

 south from commingling. Kane and Hayes lost most of their 

 dogs through this disease ;* and at every settlement in Danish 

 Greenland the native are impoverished through the death of their 

 teams. It is noticed that whenever a native loses his dogs he 

 goes very rapidly downhill in the sliding scale of Arctic re- 

 spectability, becoming a sort of hanger-on of the fortunate possessor 

 of a sledge-team. 



During the latter portion of our stay in Jakobshavn, scarcely a 

 day elapsed during which some of the dogs were not ordered to 

 be killed, on account of their having caught this fatal epidemic. 



The dog is seized with madness, bites at all other dogs, and even 

 at human beings. It is soon unable to swallow its food, and con- 

 stipation ensues. It howls loudly during the continuance of the 

 disease, but generally dies in the course of a day, with its teeth 

 firmly transfixing its tongue. It has thus something of the nature 

 of hydrophobia, but differs from that disease in not being com- 

 municable by bite, though otherwise contagious among dogs. The 

 government sent out a veterinary surgeon to investigate the nature 

 of the distemper; but he failed to suggest any remedy, and it is 

 now being " stamped out " by killing the dogs whenever seized — 

 an heroic mode of treatment, which will only be successful when 

 the last dog becomes extinct in Greenland. 



Strange to say, the dogs in Kamschatka are also being decimated 

 by a very similar disease ;f and, in a recent communication received 

 from that region, it is said that so scarce have dogs become, that 

 the natives do not care to sell them, and that 100 roubles have 

 been refused for a team of six. Fortunately for the Kamschatkans, 

 they have the reindeer as an ulterior beast of draught and burden. 

 Prof. Otto Torell brought several dogs from Greenland for the use 

 of his expedition to Spitzbergen in 1861 ; but finding them useless 

 (on account of open water) he set them free, I was informed, 

 on Spitzbergen, where they are now rapidly increasing, and will, 

 doubtless, soon return to the original wolf type. 



* Kane's " Arctic Explorations," vol. i. p. 157. 



t For all that is known about the Dog-disease in Greenland, see Tleming, 

 " Geograph. Mag.," Feb. 1875. [^ee also notes by Dr. W. L. Lindsay, in 

 the Brit, and Foreign Medico-Chirurg. Eeview, January 1870, pp. 212, 216; 

 and July 1871, pp. 10, 15, 28.— Editor.] 



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