THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
upheaval of all the old theories, and a complete revolution in setter breed- 
ing, the effects of which have lasted to the present day. At one of the shows 
there appeared a certain Mr Laverack, with a few setters, which carried 
all before them. At the same time he gave the following strange account 
of their origin. Mr Laverack shall tell it in his own words taken from a 
letter in the possession of the writer. 
“ How they originated I cannot say, but I can state with confidence 
that I can trace back this breed for a period of seventy -five years or 
upwards, having had them in my own possession forty years; and the 
late Rev. A. Harrison, of Carlisle, from whom I originally obtained 
them, had them thirty-five years previously.” 
The bombshell that fluttered the dovecotes of the setter men was Mr 
Laver ack’s statement that these wonderful dogs had been bred by him, 
during the forty years since he had the breed, from two specimens only, 
viz., Ponto and Old Moll. Soon after he published his pedigrees, 
and these showed the most extraordinary amount of inbreeding — in- 
breeding to an extent hitherto unheard of. Apparently the system he had 
been adopting ran dead against all the canons of breeding animals hither- 
to held as axioms by breeders of any description of animal; yet here 
were the results before their eyes, in the shape of dogs showing none of 
the defects hitherto by common consent laid to the door of inbreeding, 
even to a far less degree. On the contrary, the dogs he showed were above 
the average in substance, size and stamina, looking the sportsman’s dogs 
all over, and, as subsequent events proved, possessing speed, nose, 
stamina and indomitable endurance far beyond the generality. All this 
was a violent upheaval of orthodox ideas, and for a long time following 
the heated controversies, degenerating in some cases into acrimonious 
personalities, between the champions of the rival camps — ^the progressives 
on one hand, those that ranged themselves on the orthodox side on the 
other — proved what an epoch was the arrival of Mr Laverack with his 
dogs and his pedigrees. 
In those far-off days Laverack had opportunities which will never again 
fall to a poor man such as he was, for the Highlands were then a terra 
incognita to the English sportsman. In nothing has there been a greater 
revolution than in the cost of shootings. Mr Laverack once told the writer 
that no one in those days could possibly have foreseen the advance in 
popularity and consequent rise in cost of Scottish shooting otherwise. 
He had an opportunity of taking a large tract of the estate of a Duke 
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