The Egyptian and Barbary Dog,
according to Cuvier, has a very thick and round head, the ears erect at the base, large and movable, and carried horizontally, the skin nearly naked, and black or dark flesh-colour, with large patches of brown. A sub-variety has a kind of mane behind the head, formed of long stiff hairs.
Buffon imagines that the shepherd's dog — transported to different climates, and acquiring different habits — was the ancestor of the various species with which almost every country abounds; but whence they originally came it is impossible to say. They vary in their size, their colour, their attitude, their usual exterior, and their strangely different interior construction. Transported into various climates, they are necessarily submitted to the influence of heat and cold, and of food more or less abundant and more or less suitable to their natural organization; but the reason or the derivation of these differences of structure it is not always easy to explain.
Brown's
Biographical Sketches,
p. 425.