The Gordon Setter 203 
Irish setter all over.” He is wrong there, most undoubtedly, but this can 
be explained by this quotation from Laverack: “The Rev. Mr. Hutchin- 
son has as good a breed of black and tans as any one, being much lighter, 
and not nearly as cumbersome as the ordinary class.” Of course if you are 
going to take light Gordons and somewhat heavily built Irish you will not 
have much distinction of type, and that Gordons differed in those days is 
unquestionable. Laverack describes them thus, in the next paragraph 
to the foregoing quotation: “ Black-tans, as a rule, have sour, coarse heads; 
shoulders loaded, heavy and too upright; are heavy and thick-limbed; 
large feet, often too straight and stilty in hind quarters; tail thick and ropy. 
Many of the black tans have obstinate and stubborn tempers, and not par- 
ticularly easy to break.” Again he says: “They are longer in the leg 
and looser in the loin, heavier and coarser in head, thicker in the neck, 
more throaty than other breeds and not so clean made in the limbs or so 
short in the back; neither are they so close in feet. Nevertheless, they 
are very beautiful dogs, and I have seen many good black-tans, more par- 
ticularly those of the lighter build.” 
Mr. Laverack’s knowledge of the setters at Gordon Castle has already 
been set forth in an earlier quotation, and he was also acquainted with the 
setters of Major Douglas and Mr. Thompson, who kept their setters at 
Broughton Ferry, near Dundee, and presumably of the same strain as those 
of the Duke of Gordon, Lord Panmure and Admiral Wemyss. Laverack 
thought it would be a good plan to cross with the Irish blood-red setter 
to give them better heads and render them lighter and give them more 
endurance, so that the Gordons or black and tans he knew could not have 
been of the light type resembling Irish such as “Sixty-one” describes. 
In Captain Brown’s “Anecdotes of Dogs” (Edinburgh, 1829), he 
makes no mention of Gordons, nor of Irish either, for that matter, merely 
giving a short description under the head of “The English Setter,” and then 
some anecdotes. One of these is from a letter from Mr. Torry, a resident 
of Edinburgh, who furnished two or three of the anecdotes, and in the 
one referred to he said: “The black and tanned small bitch which I 
have was originally out of the Duke of Bedford’s breed.” He then told 
of taking her at ten months old to the moors, and without a single training 
lesson she pointed, backed and was staunch, and also retrieved a bird of . 
her own volition. “This happened in 1825.” Mr. Torry also told about 
a dog owned by a friend of his, “a rough brown setter, out of the shepherd’s 
