208 
PACIFIC SCIENCE, Vol. XIV, July I960 
C. G. A. Giebel (1859: 844), who classifies 
the dogs of New Zealand, Society Islands, and 
Sandwich Islands as Canis familiaris otahitensis, 
does not describe or figure them or give his 
sources. His geographical distribution echoes 
that of Walther in dropping the Low Islands 
from Forster’s original list and substituting the 
Sandwich Islands. Giebel’s classification resem- 
bles that of Reichenbach. I have not seen Gie- 
bel’s later books. He classifies (1859: 842) the 
dingo both as Canis familiaris and as Lupus 
familiaris. 
THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY 
MAORI DOG AND THE DINGO 
Giebel and Reichenbach each gives one clas- 
sification of the dingo (also called warrigal) 
that excludes it from the genus Canis. This is a 
reminder that Blumenbach’s classification in 
1780 of the native dog of Australia (absent 
from Tasmania) as Canis familiaris dingo was 
sometimes questioned. Some classifiers did not 
consider the dingo a true dog. Others, who did, 
agreed on practically only one point, according 
to Frederic Wood-Jones (1925: 352), which is 
"That the Dingo is some sort of a dog.” Many 
of the opinions, he observes (p. 350), "rest on 
nothing more than a mere haphazard statement 
founded on no proper examination of the char- 
acters of the animal.” The same can be said 
about the Polynesian Canis. 
It is already evident that one cannot talk 
about the Polynesian dog without mentioning 
Fig. 13. A Hawaiian scene (Honolulu Academy of 
Arts, Bishop Museum Negative 20599) by Choris, 
1820, previously unpublished. The large dog at the 
left looks foreign. The smaller dog by the pig some- 
what recalls the odd creature in Figures 7 and 8. 
the dingo and other native dogs of the Pacific. 
The following summary of some material on 
the New Zealand dog also shows why even 
this cursory survey of the Polynesian dog cannot 
completely ignore the dingo. However, the name 
of the dingo is linked only with that of the 
New Zealand dog, principally because more has 
been written about the Maori dog than about 
other dogs of Polynesia. 
By the early part of the nineteenth century 
the New Zealand dogs were mongrelized. The 
description in 1820 by Captain Bellingshausen 
(1945: 215) is the last, and in fact the only 
one in the nineteenth century, which inspires 
even a little confidence that it is about a native 
dog. He mentions "rather a small breed of dog 
. . . not large,” with "thick tail, erect ears, a broad 
muzzle, and short legs.” Soon packs of wild dogs 
became such a nuisance and danger that Euro- 
pean settlers imported dogs from Australia to 
use in hunting these wild packs. Some of the 
imported dogs may have been dingos, or had a 
dingo strain, to add to the existing mixture. In 
Australia the dingo itself was such a nuisance 
to settlers that it had a price on its head. Al- 
though it too had crossed with introduced dogs, 
Wood-Jones (1925: 355-35 6) considers that 
pure dingos still existed in the twentieth century 
even in those cattle districts settled the longest. 
Consideration of Wood-Jones’ comparison of 
dingo crania with those of certain other carni- 
vores will be deferred until later. A general 
description (Le Souef and Burrell, 1926: 89- 
93, pi. 9, a photograph) will provide a basis for 
the discussion to follow. The dingo, which howls 
but does not bark, has an elongated head with 
a pointed nose and well-developed canine teeth. 
It has straight toes with blunt claws, five on the 
forelimbs and four on the hind limbs. Its rather 
long, coarse hair is tawny except for greyish 
underfur. The top of the head and the dorsal 
sections are generally darker, the under parts 
lighter; the tip of the brush-tail, the feet, and 
the chest are generally white. The cheeks and 
the outside of the legs are whitish-tawny. Re- 
gional color variations include white dogs with 
some tawny shadings, and black dogs with tan 
points and face. The head and body measure 
715 mm.; the tail, 350 mm.; the height at the 
shoulder, 530 mm., and at the ear 90 mm. Wood- 
