520 NATURAL HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF DOGS. 
fidelity, — that he conducts them with an admirable intelligence 
which has not been communicated to him, — that his talents astonish 
at the same time that they give repose to his master, while it re- 
quires much time and trouble to instruct other dogs for the pur- 
poses to which they are destined ; — if we reflect on these facts, we 
shall be confirmed in the opinion, that the shepherd’s dog is the 
true dog of nature, — the dog that has been bestowed upon us on 
account of his greateskutility ; that he bears the greatest relation- 
ship to the general order of animated beings, which have mutual 
need of each other’s assistance ; that he is, in short, the one we 
ought to look upon as the stock and model of the whole species*.” 
We admire shepherds, and shepherds’ dogs, and sheep, and 
take great delight in the “ pastoral melancholy” of lonesome tree- 
less valleys, whether green or gray (alternate stony streams, the 
beds of winter torrents, and verdurous sloping sweeps of brighter 
pasture), resounding with the varied bleating of the woolly people; 
but as we know that there are many countries without either sheep 
or shepherds, yet abounding in dogs of so wild and uncultivated 
a nature that they would far rather worry mutton on their own 
account than watch it on account of others, we cannot admit the 
foregoing explanation to be true. The fact is, that so long as we 
seek with Buffon for the origin of all domestic dogs in a single 
source, we shall seek in vain. Their widely diversified nature 
and attributes cannot be explained or accounted for by the influ- 
ence of climate and the modifying effects of domestication — how- 
ever various and important these may be — acting on the descend- 
ants of only one original species. 
Pallas, a German naturalist, long settled in Russia, was among 
the first to give currency to the opinion, that the dog, viewed in 
its generality, ought to be regarded in a great measure as an ad- 
ventitious animal, that is to say, as a creature produced by the 
diversified, and, in some cases, fortuitous alliance of several natural 
species. This idea is now a prevailing one, and we certainly give 
to it our own assent. An excellent English naturalist, Mr. Bell 
(in his recent “ History of British Quadrupeds”), adheres to the 
older notion, that the wolf -is the original stock from which all our 
domesticated dogs have been derived. There are many wolves in 
this world, and several very savage ones in America, and on an 
enlarged view of the subject it might be difficult to choose im- 
partially among them, although the dogs of the western regions 
may be thought entitled to claim descent from their own wolves, 
to the same extent as ours may from those of Europe. Now as 
wild species of the Old and New World are deemed distinct by 
* Histoire des Quadrupedes, tom. i, p. 204. 
