CAIUS 83 



was used by night, probably by poachers. Youatt says 

 that the original lurcher was a cross between the grey- 

 hound and the sheep-dog. 



The brack has been defined as a deerhound (Nares' 

 Glossary) or any dog that hunts by scent ; according to 

 Caius, brach was not the name of a breed, but of a 

 hunting bitch. 



The four dogs which follow are neither named nor 

 described in The Dogs of Britain. 



There is no hint of a bull-dog, and in Caius' day bulls 

 were baited by mastiffs. The poet Gay, who had 

 written on rural sports, speaks in his Fables (1726), 

 not of the bull and the bull-dog, but of the bull and the 

 mastiff.^ 



The pointer is believed to have been unknown in 

 England until 1688 ; no such dog is mentioned by 

 Caius. Darwin ^ says that the English pointer changed 

 greatly during the hundred years before 1859, chiefly 

 in consequence of crosses with the fox- hound. 



The beagle was perhaps reckoned by Caius as a 

 harrier. 



The retriever is believed to be a cross-breed, first 

 produced in the nineteenth century. The name how- 

 ever is old. Juliana Bernes {Book of St. Albans, 1486) 

 says : — " if ye have a ehastysed spanyell that wyl be 

 rebuked and is a retriever," &c. 



Caius has not a word to say about the origin of 

 the breeds of dogs. When such questions were raised, 

 in the eighteenth century, the breeds were supposed 

 to be either independent species, or hybrids. 



1 Quoted from The Farrier (1828) by Darwin, Animals and Plants under 

 Domestication. R. B. Lee says in Modem Dogs that the bull-dog is first 

 mentioned in 1631, when Prestwioh Eaton wrote from St. Sebastian to London 

 for a mastiff and two good bull-dogs. 



^ Origin of Species, chap. i. 



