Early Origin of Varieties of Dog. gi 
Arctic ocean, by way of the river systems entering the Cas- 
pian: it is impossible to regard it as an indigenous species. 
In any case, we have here a striking example of differen- 
tiation at least four and a half centuries B.c. 
Considering how closely associated the dog was with the 
life of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; how 
intimately it was connected with their sports—for Homer 
describes a boar hunt; and even their religious observances— 
how some of these ancient people preserved its dead body with 
scrupulous care, while others sacrificed it to their deities; it 
would seem most improbable that an animal—so plastic as 
it proves in our hands in the short space of a century—had 
not become very greatly modified by accident or design 
long before any systematic and scientific efforts had been 
made to bring about the changes of which monumental 
history affords so much evidence. 
On the continent of America it had become domesticated 
at a time probably anterior to any of the records of the Old 
World; for sometimes the skull, or even the whole body, 
is found preserved, together with human remains, in the 
most ancient Peruvian graves. Older still, perhaps, were 
the dogs of the Stone Age in Europe; and though there 
are no means of ascertaining the period, both the North 
American Indians and the Eskimo had very early domes- 
ticated this invaluable animal. An immense time must have 
elapsed since the ancestors of the Eskimo of Greenland 
migrated—as Dr. Rae has established the direction—from 
west to east, and it was impossible that they could have done 
so without the assistarice of trained dogs. Indeed, in every 
instance where he is found as the associate of man, the dog 
has undergone some modification, and often to a remarkable 
degree, departing from the typical form of any known wild 
species, and in those very regions where the wild species exist, 
and still maintain the lupine character. The European wolf 
is unquestionably the same animal as that which preyed upon 
the reindeer in France, Germany, .and Britain, and was also 
