20 
The Shepherd or Police Dog 
old Germany, of which authentic data exists, was 
the Hovawart, and the data concerning this dog can 
he traced to the Fourteenth Century, from that time 
to the present there is enough existing material, even 
to rather good illustrations, to prove that the Shep¬ 
herd of today is the lineal descendant of these ancient 
dogs. While there is a great variability in the skulls 
of all the wild Canidae, the anatomical correlations 
in all these skulls, from the very earliest prehistoric 
type to the modern Shepherd, exist in such perfec¬ 
tion that there is very little doubt as to the fixed 
basic type. The Shepherd dogs of the world are a 
big family, dividing itself into many separate breeds. 
To name the principal ones: We have in Eng¬ 
land the collie and the Old English Sheepdog and a 
dwarf form known as the Shetland Sheepdog; in 
Russia a similar form, the Owtchar; Poland has an 
intermediary form that can not be considered a fixed 
breed, but Hungary had a distinct type in the Kom- 
ondor; Rumania has a dog known as the Istrian 
Shepherd, a dog of heavy conformation and rather 
pendulous ears; then there is a Transcaucasian form 
that breeds true to type; in Switzerland we find two 
distinct types, the Sennenhund and the Bernerhund, 
both heavy powerful dogs, used principally with 
the cattle, and the Appenzeller, a smaller and lighter 
type : Belgium has several types, a smooth and a 
rough-coated dog similar to the German Shepherd, 
another of a like conformation but carrying a flat 
setter-like coat of jet black hair; another wire-haired 
type known as the Bouvrier des Flanders. The dis- 
