understand them, wound no feelings either, we should care little by what names the dog had been called, if he was treated with practical kindness.

Like every animal that was not cloven-footed, and did not chew the cud, he was unclean to the Jews, and consequently with them he was safe from sacrifice. Heathens, on the contrary, made a religion of that which was an impiety to Israel, and the dog contributed his full proportion to the mountains of flesh that palpitated on the altar. The Romans, who without fastidiousness immolated him to the gods, whipped him annually for a criminal, and then impaled him, because his ancestors had slept on the night on which the Gauls attempted to seize the Capitol. The folly and cruelty of this Roman commemoration was surpassed, however, by a custom which existed till the reign of Louis XIV. in the metropolis of France, where it was the wont of the civic authorities in full costume to burn yearly a number of cats, for what offence we are not informed, on the Place de Grève.

The sacrifice of the dog, if legends are true, brought upon him another distinction-that of being eaten. Porphyry relates that a part of his carcass having fallen from the altar, the priest picked it up, and burning his fingers with the smoking flesh, put them suddenly in his mouth. The taste was so savoury, that the ceremony ended, he ate his fill of the dog, and took the rest to his wife. However this may be, the dog somehow or other found his way to the larder. Hippocrates says he was eaten by the Greeks, and the Romans considered him to be so great a delicacy, that a puppy was prominent at some of their most sumptuous feasts. In China, it is well known, he is fattened upon vegetables like an ox or a pig, and publicly sold in the butchers' shops. Numerous savages hold him in high estimation, often preferring him to all other meat, and reserving him for their chiefs. The sale of dog-flesh for human food is carried on secretly at Paris, though forbidden by the government, who extend a formal sanction to the traffic in horse-flesh. M. Blaze, who has frequently eaten both, prefers dog. Buffon, on the contrary, thought it extremely disagreeable. But as those nations who relish it most keep their dogs exclusively on vegetables and fish, and will never touch a European breed that is carnivorously fed, neither Buffon nor Blaze can have tasted the viand in perfection.

In Lapland the dog is killed for his skin, and in countries where no other motive hastens his death, the necessity there is to place a limit upon population still brings numbers to a violent end. The dog-tax in England has proved a measure of beneficence by stifling in its birth superfluous life, since few under

these

these circumstances rear a useless progeny. Elsewhere nearly all the dogs that are born are suffered to grow up, and running about the streets mangy and half-starved, their existence becomes a nuisance to the public and a burthen to themselves. In France the chiffonniers are commissioned to knock the wanderers on the head. A few years since the government of Bombay was obliged to send a cargo of dogs to be destroyed out at sea, in order to relieve the city of their inordinate numbers without offence to the Parsees, who regard them with reverence. But less delicacy is observed in various great towns of the East. A man armed with a heavy bludgeon drags a dead dog through the street, which bringing about him all the curs of the neighbourhood, he mows them down right and left with his club. It is said that they set upon him from a knowledge of his evil designs: Lord Bacon, indeed, has mentioned it as a matter of notoriety that, whenever the dogs of a town are condemned, their instinct reveals the errand of the executioner.

The sacrifice of the dog was simple ignorance, to kill him for food is a question of taste, to check his unlimited increase a matter of compulsion. But to butcher him for sport is a wanton inhumanity, of which the untutored savage has left the distinction to civilized nations. It was in the country of Virgil and Cicero that English mastiffs, transmitted to Rome by a special officer maintained in our island for the purpose, were exposed in the amphitheatre to deadly combats with the beasts of the forest. It was in England herself that the practice found perhaps its most sedulous imitators-that lions were fought, bulls baited, and that the contests of dogs, who tore one another till they died on the spot, became a fashionable amusement. But of all the cruelties of which the dog has been the victim, the greatest, unquestionably, are those perpetrated in the name of science. Experiments within a certain limit are perhaps excusable in the interests of humanity. But to dissect living animals as a regular system-to butcher them by scores and hundreds! What discovery could justify such abomination? And still more, what discovery that these barbarities have actually revealed is worthy to be set against a fraction of the agonies of its thousand martyrs! M. Blaze assures us that in every great town in France there are people whose sole occupation is to collect the subjects for these monstrous experiments. We have shuddered to read, and find it impossible to write, his details of scenes which might lead us to question which was the brute and which the man.

The physicians of former days employed the dog in a manner hardly less revolting in the cure of disease. He was opened alive, and applied warm as a rare specific to assuage pain. They had sometimes

VOL. LXXII. NO. CXLIV.

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sometimes the mercy to cut his throat, and wait the expiration of life before the afflicted members were plunged in his vitals. entered largely into the Pharmacopoeia. His bones were pounded for powders, his fat melted for ointments, his carcase distilled for a liquid of extraordinary virtue.

Black has been an ominous hue for man and for beast, and black dogs, in the common creed, were the agents of magicians, and the earthly form of the Evil one himself. Cornelius Agrippa was always accompanied by one of these animals, and his friend and disciple, Wierus, in order to disprove the universal notion that the dog was a demon, was obliged to publish that he had not only the appearance, but all the habits of his species (see Bayle's article on Agrippa). Even so late as 1702, the French soldiers who defended Landau against the arms of the Imperialists, were firmly persuaded that the dog of their general was a familiar spirit, the real author of all the military movements, and a pledge, by virtue of his supernatural powers, of certain victory. Popular credulity was sometimes wrought on in a contrary direction by crafty monks. Baronius affirms that the dogs refused the bread which was thrown them by the assassins of Thomas à Becket. They took, according to M. Blaze, the same method to express their disapprobation of a young man who married his cousin without a dispensation, sternly refusing to partake of the delicacies of his wedding banquet.

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We have seen the dog the victim of man. Man has frequently, on the other hand, been the victim of the dog. The prohibition to the Jews, recorded in the book of Deuteronomy, to make an offering in the temple of the price of the dog, shows that he had attained a marketable value, which is a clear proof that he was already domesticated. But he still preserved much of his natural ferocity. The flesh torn by beasts was ordered to be cast to him by the Levitical law, and it is a threat of Scripture, often repeated, that dogs shall devour the carcases of wicked men. Him that dieth in the city shall the dogs eat, and him that dieth in the fields shall the fowls of the air eat.' The sword to slay and the dog to tear,' is one of the judgments announced by the prophet Jeremiah. If we pass from sacred history to profane, we find the anthropophagous tendencies of the dog alluded to in Homer, where Hector promises Ajax for a meal to his dogs-a fate from which Hector himself was narrowly rescued by the tears of Priam. As long in fact as dogs retain a tincture of their native wildness, they eat the lord of the creation with as little compunction as the meanest of the animals he has subjected to his rule. They are to be found busy on the field of battle, mingled with vultures and jackals, and ever forward to assist them to discharge their office

of

of scavengers of nature. Lord Byron saw them by the Seraglio at Constantinople preying on the dead bodies of refractory Janizaries: hence the well-known lines in the Siege of Corinth: 'From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,

As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh,' &c. &c.

There is something in the chase which maintains in hounds a sanguinary disposition in the midst of domestication; and it has been no unusual thing for them to devour persons who fell down in their kennel, or who entered incautiously without a weapon to keep them at bay. But the only instance with which we are acquainted of a man being fairly hunted in modern times is that of worthy Parson Adams, who so laid about him with his crabstick that the field was strewed with killed and wounded. There has been no lack of another sort of man-hunt--the tracking of a flying enemy by the keen-scented blood-hound. Sir Walter Scott has made all the world familiar with the manner in which border forayers were pursued by these noble animals; and how even rulers of Scotland had been compelled to learn the arts of William of Deloraine, who

'By wily turns, by desperate bounds,

Had baffled Percy's best blood-hounds.'

Bruce broke the continuity of the scent, and threw out the dogs, by wading down a stream, and springing into a tree without touching the bank. Wallace escaped by killing a suspected follower-a device not uncommon on such occasions, when the dog invariably stayed at the blood, which confused and blunted his delicate perceptions. That it was no easy matter to turn aside the pursuit is evident from the anecdote which Robert Boyle relates of a blood-hound who tracked a servant along several miles of a public road to the house where he was lodged in the market-place of a town, without being perplexed for a single moment by the multiplicity of footsteps. From chasing princes and heroes the blood-hound sank to be the detector of deerstealers and felons. It was while reserved for this ignoble trade that they made a prize of the last scion of royalty which it was their fortune to follow-the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, who was detected by their aid at the bottom of a ditch in which he sought concealment after Sedgemoor.

A more questionable use of the dog was to train him for war. The ancients early discovered this faculty of his nature. He was probably taught at first to garrison castles and fortresses, where, from his vigilance and bravery, he answered all the purposes of an armed sentinel; and this mode of defence is said by Colonel Hamilton Smith to have continued till the introduction of regular armies. From their admirable power in anticipating surprises,

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they have been largely employed, especially by the Turks, to guard outposts. At the present moment the French videttes in Algiers are always preceded by a couple of dogs. Anciently they were conspicuous in the action itself. After Marius had defeated the Cimbri, his legions had to renew a deadlier battle with the women and the dogs. The Celts deemed their dogs of such importance in war that they armed them with collars of pointed iron, with a breast-plate for a shield. Some dogs, accoutred with the latter piece of defensive armour, and repelling an assault of soldiers on a citadel, form the subject of a bronze discovered at Herculaneum. Certain Gauls not only made the dog discharge the duty of a soldier in their wars: a squadron of two hundred formed the body-guard of their king. But it would be endless to relate the multitude of occasions in which the dog has been employed in the capacity of a warrior. The instance which most nearly concerns ourselves-for, if Camerarius is to be believed, it was imitated by Queen Elizabeth in Ireland, who sent no less than six hundred dogs with the army of Essex-is the use that was made of them against the savages in America. Columbus set the example in a battle with the natives of St. Domingo, when, with two hundred foot, twenty horse, and twenty dogs, he routed a prodigious army of Indians. The terrible wounds inflicted by the dogs upon naked savages created such a panic that thenceforward they became a part of the tactics of American warfare. Notwithstanding our reprobation of the Spaniards, a hundred blood-hounds were, in 1795, landed in Jamaica under English auspices, to attack the Maroons. When a trial was made of them by a sham fire, they rushed forward with the greatest impetuosity, dragging along their keepers, who held them back by ropes, and even turning in their ferocity to bite the muskets till they tore pieces from the stocks. Happily the Maroons, hearing rumours of the dogs, surrendered without a blow, and the barbarity which promised to be a stain upon our name was for once the cause of a bloodless victory. Those who, on that occasion, quoted the position of Paley, that if the grounds and end of war are justifiable, all the means that appear necessary to the end are justifiable also, forgot the limitation made to the doctrine by the moralist himself, who says that the combatants are nevertheless bound to respect those conventional laws which the custom of nations has sanctified, and which, whilst they are mutually conformed to, mitigate the calamities of war without weakening its operations. Without this conclusive reasoning, it is still enough that the instincts of humanity are against such warfare. The heart has its arguments as well as the understanding' is one of the immortal sayings of Pascal.

When