The dog / by William Youatt.

  • William Youatt
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dog / by William Youatt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with dogs, and then not with dogs that ran by sight, or succeeded by their swiftness of foot, but by beagU^s very little superior to those of modern days. Of the stronger and more ferocious dogs there is, however, occa- sional mention. The bull-dog of modern date does not excel tlie one (possibly of nearly the same race) that was presented to Alexander the Great, and that boldly seized a ferocious lion, or another that would not quit his hold, although one leg and then another Mas cut off. It would be difficult and foreign to the object of this work fully to trace the early history of the dog. Both in Greece and in Rome he was highly estimated. Alexander built a city in honour of a dog; and the Emperor Hadrian decreed the most solemn rites of sepulture to another on account of his sagacity and fidelity. The translator of Arrian imagines that the use of the pugnaces (fight- ing) and the sagaces (intelligent)—the more ferocious dogs, and those who artfully circumvented and cauglit their prey—was known in the earlier periods of Greek and Roman history, but that the celereS, the dogs of speed, the greyhounds of every kind, were peculiar to the British islands, or to the western and nortliern continents of Europe, the interior and the produce of which were in those days unknown to the Greeks and Romans. By most authors who have inquired into the origin of these varieties of the dog the sagaces have been generally assigned to Greece— the pugnaces to Asia—and the celeres to the Celtic nations. Of the aboriginal country of the latter there can be little doubt; but the accounts that are given of the English mastiff at the invasion of Britain by the Romans, and the early history of the English hound, which was once peculiar to this country, and at the present day degenerates in every other, would go far to prove that these breeds also are indigenous to our island. Oppian thus describes the hunting dog as he finds him in Britain:— There is, besides, an excellent kind of scenting dogs, though small, yet worthy of estimation. They are fed by the fierce nation of painted Bri- tons, who call them agascei. In size they resemble worthless greedy house-dogs that gape under tables. They are crooked, lean, coarse-haired, and heavy-eyed, but armed with powerful claws and deadly teeth. The agascBus is of good nose and most excellent in following scent. Among the savage dogs of ancient times were the Hyrcanian, said, on account of their extreme ferocity, to have been crossed with the tiger,— the Locrian, chiefly employed in hunting the boar,—the Pannonian, used in war as well as in the chace, and by whom the first charge on the enumy was always made,—and the Molossian, of Epirus, likewise trained to war as well as to the honours of the amphitheatre and the dangers of the chace. This last breed had one redeeming quality—an inviolable attachment to their owners. This attachment was reciprocal; for it is said that the Mo- lossi used to weep over their faithful quadruped companions slain in war. ^lian relates that one of them, and his owner, so much distinguished themselves at the battle of Marathon, that the effigy of the dog was placed on the same tablet with that of his master. Soon after Britain was discovered the pugnaces of Epirus were pitted against those of our island, and, according to the testimony of Gratius, completely beaten. A variety of this class, but as large and as ferocious, was employed to guard the sheep and cattle, or to watch at the door of » New Sporting Magazine, vol. xiv. p. 97. Oppian's Cyuegeticus, lib. i. v. 4G8—480.