193 
VEETEBRATA. 
limited in his range. The wild or semi-savage dogs, as the Esquimaux, for instance, are, with few 
exceptions, afraid of wolves, and fly from them in terror, as if governed by an instinctive aversion. 
There is a permanent and universal difference in the manner of carrying the tail, that of the dop- 
being curled more or less upward and over the back, while that of the wolf is uniformly low and 
dragging. The dog of every variety shows a natural disposition to guard property, either his 
own or that of his master ; he is an instinctive sentinel on guard, especially at night — a trait of 
character not possessed by the Avolf. 
It is well known that the form of the pupil of the eye is a characteristic of species ; in the horse 
it is oval, in the cat linear, in the dog and wolf it is round. This fact has been appealed to as 
evidence of the identity of the two animals. But the reply is, that man, and many other crea- 
tures, have the round pupil. This, therefore, affords no proof. Two things may, however, be as- 
serted, which seem to go far to settle this question. The eye of the wolf is oblique, and always 
remains so. There are many races of wild dogs, none of which have ever acquired this characteristic. 
In fact, as no wolf, to our knowledge, has ever become a dog, so no dog has ever become a wolf. 
The difficulty, not to say impossibility, of considering the wolf as the parent of the dog, has led 
to other suggestions ; some hold the jackal to be the progenitor of the dog race, while others 
consider this animal to be the civilized dog relapsed into barbarism. As these are mere 
conjectures without proofs, they may safely be dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. It 
is a fact well known, that the jackal has a natural odor which is very offensive, and must ever 
have prevented him from becoming the favorite of man. 
Some have imagined the dog to be the offspring of the fox, but this is contradicted by the fact 
that the pupil of the eye — which, as before remarked, is a permanent and characteristic index to 
species — ^is linear and vertical in the fox as in the cat. It may be farther added on this point, 
that, while the corpuscles of the blood of the dog — as in most other mammalia — are circular, 
in the fox they are oval. 
Another suggestion is, that the dog is a cross between two or more members of the family of 
Canidse, as between a wolf and jackal, or the jackal and fox, or perhaps the result of a Avider 
mixture of races and varieties. It is easy to see that all this is contrary to the analogy of nature, 
which, although it presents us with ]3ermanent varieties — as is exemplified in various animals, and 
the dog himself — never creates a prominent and permanent type, having the character of a 
new species, by means of a mixture of other species. We may add that the fact already stated, of 
the existence of races of wild dogs, renders any such explanation alike unnecessary and absurd. 
It matters not whether these races are descendants of an original stock that has remained in their 
normal state from the beginning, or whether they are the offspring of domesticated breeds, 
relapsed into savageness : the inference is the same. Just as we know that the wild horse ot 
South America and Texas had a horse for his father — even though he may have been a 
domesticated animal — so we may infer that the wild dogs of India had dogs for their parents. 
In order to understand the full force of this reasoning, let us turn to the accounts which 
travelers give us of these animals. The dog of the Deccan, called by the Mahrattas Kolsun, is 
also found in Nepaul, where it is called Buansu. Its head is elongated and compressed, its nose 
sharp, its eyes "oblique, the pupils round, their irides brown. The ears are long, erect, and somewhat 
rounded at the top, and the limbs are large and strong. It is of a rufous brown color, and hunts 
deer, hogs, and other animals in packs of fifty to sixty; It has a coarse, ill-natured expression, but 
it is not identical with the wolf ; it has not even a very close resemblance either to the wolf, fox, 
or jackal. Though it has peculiarities of construction, which wo shall hereafter notice, no one, 
on seeing it, would hesitate for a moment to say it was a dog, and nothing else. Nor is this the 
only race of wild dogs ; there are many others, more or less resembling this, and whether we 
consider them as original races, or as descendants of breeds broken loose from domesticity, the 
inference is the same — that the dog is a permanent and independent type, and not the mere hybrid 
of other species. If there is any admissible qualification of this conclusion, we conceive it to be 
this and only this : there may be, and probably are, certain dogs in existence, which have some 
foreign blood in their veins, either from crossings of the wolf, or fox, or jackal, or a part, or all 
together. The characters of such animals, in particular instances, may be more or less tinged by 
