344 The Dog Book 
believe that the name is from the old English word “coll,” meaning black 
or dark, and that as the collies were mainly black it just meant the black 
dog, and then came into use for the sheep dog. ‘The objections to that are 
many, but here are two: the word collie, or colley, or, still older, coally, 
came south, and there were plenty of black dogs in England to which the 
word collie or any of its equivalents was never applied; and secondly, 
there is a Gaelic or Celtic word for the dog, which is phonetically spelled 
collie, and with the broad “o”’ of the Northerner could very well be Bewick’s 
“coally.” 
Lee holds to the opinion that it came from black-faced sheep being 
called by that name, and thus the dog that looked after the colleys was the 
colley dog. To accept this we must assume that this name for the variety 
of sheep was universal, and that is not in evidence. Lee quotes the “ Dic- 
tionary of Husbandry,” 1743, which gives the word colley as being “such 
sheep as have black faces and legs.’ The wool of these sheep is very harsh 
with hairs, and not so white as other sheep.” It seems somewhat strange 
that this name for certain sheep should have died out so quickly, for it is 
found nowhere else that we are aware of, and surely persons who wrote of 
collies a century ago had pretty good knowledge of what was common 
fifty years before. Of course if there was not a more evident origin than 
the Highland word—which is akin to the Irish word for colleen—the black- 
faced-sheep suggestion would be a little better than any other, but it is 
not worth considering in the face of the very plain fact that the word is 
Geelic or Celtic. 
It is probable that the word travelled south with more freedom in some 
directions. Our knowledge of Scotland is of the east side, Edinburgh to 
Dunbar, and later at school at Jedburgh; good old Jethart, with its relics 
of the oldest of English in its “yow” and “mie” for you and me, and its 
historical Jethart justice. We do not recall when we did not know the dog 
as the collie, pronounced as Bewick spelled it. Undoubtedly we heard it 
called shepherd’s dog, and probably collie dog, but as long as we have 
known the dog we seem to have known him as the collie, and that of course 
from what our elders called the variety. At the same time we have no 
recollection of the name as applied to sheep of any kind. 
From the first drawings of the rough collie, which are those of Bewick 
and Howitt, we find him practically the same dog that he is to-day, and 
totally different from any other dog in the British Isles, hence he is a good 
