SKULL OF DOMESTIC DOG.
It is a remarkable circumstance, when we come to consider the probable origin of the Dog, that there is evidence of his domestication at such early periods, and by so many savage tribes in different parts of the world. As we have already seen, tame Dogs were possessed by savages in the neolithic, or newer stone period, by the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and the ancient inhabitants of North and South America, to say nothing of the numerous savage tribes at the present day, such as the Australians and the inhabitants of Guiana. Now the important question arises, had all these Dogs a common origin? Did the great neolithic Dog, the Sheep-dog of Job’s time, the Greyhounds, Turnspits, and Hounds of the Assyrians and Greeks, the divinely-honoured animals of Peru, and the supposed ancestors of the Eskimo and the Chippeways, spring from a single pair? or have various wild species of Canidæ been tamed and converted into true domestic Dogs, by different people in different parts of the world, these various species having since been crossed and re-crossed with one another and with their parent forms, until a species has been produced as complex in its origin as the English nation, which has flowing in its veins the blood of ancient Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, Norman, and Fleming?
Until recently it was thought that all the evidence which could be brought to bear on the matter pointed to a separate origin of the Dog. It was argued, for instance, that as we have evidences of distinct breeds existing in far-back periods of the world’s history, there was actually no time, prior to those periods, for him to have diverged from a savage ancestor, such as a Wolf or a Jackal. It was also thought highly unlikely that a number of primitive races of man should have separately tamed different wild Canidæ. Mr. Youatt, one of our best authorities on the Dog, writing in 1845, says: “This power of tracing back the Dog to the very earliest periods of history, and the fact that he then seemed to be as sagacious, as faithful and as valuable as at the present day, strongly favours the opinion that he descended from no inferior and comparatively worthless animal; that he was not the progeny of the Wolf, the Jackal, or the Fox; but he was originally created, somewhat as we now find him, the associate and friend of man.”
SKULL OF YOUNG DOG.
A few years ago there was no gainsaying arguments such as these, for then nearly everybody believed that the world was literally only six thousand years old, and that species were absolutely unchangeable. But Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Darwin have “changé tout cela.” The argument from time fails utterly, and other facts have to be taken into consideration.
There is, first of all, the fact of identity of structure. There is absolutely no definition framable which will include all the varieties of the domestic Dog, and exclude all the wild species—none even which will include all the Dogs properly so called, both wild and tame, and at the same time exclude the Wolf and Jackal. It is the same as regards habits, instincts, mental endowments, &c. Wolves and Jackals can be and have been tamed. Domestic Dogs can become, and have again and again become, wild, and in no way better than true aborigines; and to assert that the Dog is not descended from a Jackal because his manners and customs are better, his tail more curly, and his voice a bark instead of a howl, is about as just as to assert that Englishmen cannot possibly be descended from ancient Britons, because they wear clothes instead of a coating of blue paint.
