Early History of the Dog 23 
wrote of the dingoes as being of the size of mastiffs.. Other instances of 
this exaggeration in description have already been mentioned, and we had 
better discard them as fanciful and look at things rationally, and as far as 
possible take illustrations from life in place of statements. 
The Assyrian dogs might have been thirty inches high, and that was 
likely higher than those of Egypt. The shoulder-height of the ordinary 
gentleman’s dog of Greece and Rome was twenty inches. The late Colonel 
Stuart Taylor had for many years a standing offer of one thousand dollars 
for a dog of thirty-four inches, and did not withdraw it till he had measured 
the St. Bernard “Rector,” which he would not buy on account of its con- 
dition, coupled with the pleading of the owner’s wife. 
These are facts and are strongly in contrast with the frequently quoted 
statement in Goldsmith’s “ Animated Nature,” that the Irish wolfhounds 
were four feet tall. That four-footer, if he was ever measured, must have 
been tested with “Harry Reed’s tape.’ The explanation of this remark 
is that on one occasion a sporting authority of that name had to referee a 
jumping competition in which a man had undertaken to clear a certain 
distance. Reed was paid to make the man lose by “faking” the tape. 
Fortunately for the man, Reed, in place of inserting an extra foot in the tape, 
cut one out, and when it came to measuring the jump, it made a difference 
of two feet in the man’s favour over what was intended. For years after 
that when there seemed anything queer with regard to a measured distance 
in sporting matters in England, some one would remark that they must 
have had Harry Reed’s tape, and most assuredly many dogs even to this day 
have been measured with that article in the home kennels. 
Research on the American continent has not yielded anything very 
definite, there not being the counterpart of the Egyptian or Assyrian monu- 
ments or the contents of palaces or tombs to ransack. Fossil remains are at 
best very indefinite, and geologists tell of “true dogs” without being able 
to say much more than what we read of the lake-dweller’s marsh-dog. 
It takes very little harking back to get to prehistoric times even in the 
oldest parts of America—only to the conquest in the sixteenth century—so 
that we have no knowledge as to the age of the mummy remains recovered 
from Colombia and the west coast of South America. If we only knew 
something about the dates, it would be more interesting as to the dogs found 
in those despoiled tombs. Reiss and Stubel in their handsomely illustrated 
“Necropolis of Ancon” give one plate to dog-skulls, and in the accompany- 
