Names of Animals. 5695 



man bache is a wild sow * and these words bear a strong family like- 

 ness to each other. I am inclined to believe that they are artificial 

 feminine modifications of the word buck, possibly first applied to the 

 female deer, and afterwards transferred to other animals, exactly as is 

 the case with our own buck and doe. 



Hound, the Gothic hund, is the Greek mm, which, like many other 

 words beginning with the same letter, was pronounced, not with a k, 

 but with a strong guttural /*. In French chien, and in Latin cants 

 are identical forms, and in Sanscrit we also find c van and cun, besides 

 a host of other and apparently most dissimilar modifications of the 

 same root in kindred dialects. Hound means the hunter. It is iden- 

 tical in origin with the words hunt and hand, and may be traced to 

 the Gothic hinlhan, Latin ipre-hendere, to seize. 



Puppy is the Latin pupus, pupa, our own "poppet" — terms of en- 

 dearment, in the first place applied to young children, and afterwards 

 transferred to the young of animals, and, as was natural, retained in 

 particular by the most domestic among them. Our word baby is of 

 the same family; and all these names, as well as papa and other 

 similar ones, are imitations of the earliest cries of children. Puppy, 

 as applied to a fop, is no doubt a corruption of puppet, in the sense 

 of a dressed-up doll, just in the same way as we find muneco, mani- 

 kin, used in Spanish. 



Whelp is the Danish hvelp, Swedish valp, and in all probability 

 the Latin vulpes. Primarily applied to fox-cubs, and then made of 

 more general application, it affords us a curious instance of a process 

 exactly the reverse of what we have seen to be the case in puppy. 

 Vulpes is the same word as our wolf, and may be traced back to a 

 Sanscrit origin, signifying the tearer or gripper. 



Of the numerous varieties of dog, I have been able to trace the ori- 

 gin of the following. Bandog seems to be compounded of band and 

 dog, and to have been originally a sort of general term, applied to 

 those dogs whose fierceness obliged them to be always kept bound or 

 chained up. Beagle is the French bigle. Skinner derives it from 

 bugler, to bellow (or to bell, as we say of deer), from their deep, 

 sonorous bark. Following the same idea, Richardson thinks that it 

 may be formed from some diminutive of the verb to bay. Skinner 

 also suggests as an origin the Italian piccolo, small ; but this seems 

 more like a guess than the others. In French bigler is to squint ; 

 whence it is probable that bigle, as the dog's name, is only a French 

 way of spelling our own word. Brach is a word we meet with in 

 Shakspeare and elsewhere. It is French bvaque, Dutch brak, Italian 



