e allied to greyhounds; at the later of these
periods a dog resembling a hound is figured, with drooping ears, but with a
longer back and more pointed head than in our hounds. There is, also, a
turnspit, with short and crooked legs, closely resembling the existing
variety; but this kind of monstrosity is so common with various animals, as
with the ancon sheep, and even, according to Rengger, with jaguars in
Paraguay, that it would be rash to look at the monumental animal as the
parent of all our turnspits: Colonel Sykes[9] also has described an Indian
Pariah dog as presenting the same monstrous character. The most ancient dog
represented on the Egyptian monuments is one of the most singular; it
resembles a greyhound, but has long pointed ears and a short curled tail: a
closely allied variety still exists in Northern Africa; for Mr. E. Vernon
Harcourt[10] states that the Arab boar-hound is "an eccentric hieroglyphic
animal, such as Cheops once hunted with, somewhat resembling the rough
Scotch deer-hound; their tails are curled tight round on their backs, {18}
and their ears stick out at right angles." With this most ancient variety a
pariah-like dog coexisted.

We thus see that, at a period between four and five thousand years ago,
various breeds, viz. pariah dogs, greyhounds, common hounds, mastiffs,
house-dogs, lapdogs, and turnspits, existed, more or less closely
resembling our present breeds. But there is not sufficient evidence that
any of these ancient dogs belonged to the same identical sub-varieties with
our present dogs.[11] As long as man was believed to have existed on this
earth only about 6000 years, this fact of the great diversity of the breeds
at so early a period was an argument of much weight that they had proceeded
from several wild sources, for there would not have been sufficient time
for their divergence and modification. But now that we know, from the
discovery of flint tools embedded with the remains of extinct animals in
districts which have since undergone great geographical changes, that man
has existed for an incomparably longer period, and bearing in mind that the
most barbarous nations possess domestic dogs, the argument from
insufficient time falls away greatly in value.

Long before the period of any historical record the dog was domesticated in
Europe. In the Danish Middens of the Neolithic or Newer Stone period, bones
of a canine animal are imbedded, and Steenstrup ingeniously argues that