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PACIFIC SCIENCE, Vol. XIV, July I960 
looked like, and what traits survived either in 
wild dogs or in domesticated dogs in native 
villages. Descriptions derived from natives were 
quoted, telling what they thought their ances- 
tors’ dogs looked like. To R. Taylor (1870: 
604) the New Zealand dog or "canis familiaris 
kuri . . . was small and long-haired, of a dirty 
white or yellow colour, with a bushy tail.” This 
dog, Taylor had learned from natives, had been 
brought when their ancestors first came to the 
islands. Taylor considers it "not improbable, 
however, that they found another kind already 
in the country, brought by the older Melanesian 
race, of a larger size, with long, white hair and 
black tail . . . said to have been very quiet and 
docile, and was known by the name pataka taw- 
hiti, both these are now quite lost in the host 
of introduced ones.” No support occurs for the 
theory of Melanesians having preceded Poly- 
nesians in occupying New Zealand. A. Reischek 
(1924: 100-101) writes about "Canis Maori” 
on receiving a dogskin mat said to have been 
made from hides of native dogs. The term 
"native” becomes increasingly vaguer in mean- 
ing as time passes; applied to dogs it might 
mean those of any breed that a Polynesian native 
owned. 
George M. Thomson (1922: 64-70), who 
classifies the New Zealand dog as Canis fami- 
liaris, has assembled information about its ap- 
pearance from the time of Crozet and Forster to 
the twentieth century. The material comes from 
early visitors, later travel writers and ethnog- 
graphers, contributors to New Zealand news- 
papers and scientific journals, and personal cor- 
respondents. Included are statements indicating 
that arguments occurred which linked the names 
of the Australian dingo and the New Zealand 
native dog. For example, a certain settler writes 
(Thomson, 1922: 68) that in 1858 among the 
wild dogs that he killed were some yellow ones 
that "looked like a distinct breed. They were 
low set, with short pricked ears, broad fore- 
head, sharp snout, and bushy tail. Indeed those 
acquainted with the dingo professed to see little 
difference between that animal and the New 
Zealand yellow wild dog.” Like many other 
pioneers, this settler, in hunting wild dogs that 
harried people and livestock, had the help of 
his "kangaroo dog,” imported from Australia 
hr, OHS EM HE BE ROE It - 
Fig. 17. "Le chien de berger” (Buffon, 1755? V : 
pi. 28). The shepherd’s cur that is compared with the 
Maori and the Australian native dogs. 
for hunting wild dogs. Not stated in the accounts 
is the breed of the kangaroo dog, whether dingo 
or mongrel. 
None of the explorers of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries mentions transporting na- 
tive dogs for exchange between Australia and 
Polynesia, so that, as far as is known, cross- 
breeding in European times of dingos and Poly- 
nesian native dogs did not take place till after 
the eighteenth century. However, Polynesian 
dogs, it will be recalled, were introduced into 
dogless New Caledonia and New Hebrides by 
Captain Cook on his second expedition; and, in 
the first quarter of the nineteenth century, R. P. 
Lesson and P. Garnot ( Duperrey, 1826, 1: 123), 
natural scientists on the Duperrey expedition, 
abandoned at Port Jackson, Australia, the native 
dogs they had bought in New Ireland. Later I 
shall return to their comparison of these and 
other Melanesian and New Guinea dogs with 
the dingo. For the present, it is enough to note 
that although Europeans transported local dogs 
