250 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
movements and sent them away with a kick and 
a curse whenever he got the chance. Most, if not 
all, of these poor dogs had owners who gave them 
shelter but no food or very little, and probably in 
most cases succeeded in evading the license duty. 
There is no doubt that in the past the dog 
population of London was always largely composed 
of animals of this kind—“ curs of low degree,” and 
a great variety of mongrels, mostly living on their 
wits. An account of the dogs of London of two or 
three or four centuries ago would have an extra- 
ordinary interest for us now, but, unfortunately, 
no person took the pains to write it. Caius, our 
oldest writer on dogs, says of “curres of the 
mungrel and rascall sort”—the very animals we 
want to know about: “Of such dogs as keep not 
their kind, of such as are mingled out of sundry 
sortes not imitating the conditions of some one 
certaine Spece, because they resemble no notable 
shape, nor exercise any worthy property of the true, 
perfect, and gentle kind, it is not necesarye that 
I write any more of them, but to banish them as 
unprofitable implements out of the boundes of my 
Booke.” It is regrettable that he did “banish” 
them, as he appears to have been something of an 
observer on his own account. Had he given us a 
few pages on the life and habits of the “ rascall 
sort” of animal, his Booke of E'nglishe Dogges, 
which after so many centuries is still occasionally 
reprinted, would have been as valuable to us now 
as Turner’s on British birds (1544) and Willughby’s 
