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When Pietro della Valle visited Persia, during the early part of the seventeenth century, it was the regular mode of execution, for certain classes of criminals, to cast them to dogs kept expressly for the purpose. He saw some Jews, accused of magic, brought within the view of these terrible destroyers, with a promise of pardon if they turned Mahometans. At the sight of the dogs, all the Jews, except one, preferred apostacy to death; and as for him,' says Della Valle, whom I know not whether to call constant or obstinate in his foolish opinion, he was torn to pieces and devoured by the dogs, invoking the name of Moses with his latest breath. He had been happy,' he continues, thus to die if he had been a Christian; but being, as he was, a Jew, these sufferings served but to anticipate a little in this world his future hell.' If the old traveller had written a treatise on intolerance, he would probably have produced nothing half so forcible as this cool reflection of a simple mind inflamed by no peculiar degree of theological ardour.

Oviedo, in his History of the Indies,' says that a criminal who was cast to a dog, accustomed to eat the condemned, having fallen on his knees, and begged for life, the animal stopped short, and refused to do his office. The Spaniards, taking it for a miracle, pardoned the poor wretch; but M. Blaze thinks that the effect was produced by the eyes of the man meeting those of the dog, which he believes, according to a popular notion, to be a method of intimidating, or, as it is usually termed, fascinating animals; and he speaks as if he had tried it with success on unruly horses. Sismondi relates an instance of forbearance stronger and better authenticated than that which we have quoted from M. Blaze. Some hounds of the tyrant of Milan, who were fed on the flesh of man, taught to chase him for their prey, and already rendered ferocious by scores of victims, not only refused to kill a boy that was given them, of twelve years old, but when the keeper, in consequence of their obstinacy, cut the throat of the child, showed an equal repugnance to touch the corpse. this case, at least, may not the phenomenon have arisen from the tender years of the victim awakening their dormant affections? The canine species have a peculiar love for children, though, like all their acquired faculties, it is irregularly distributed. How gently they treat them, how much they endure from them! Colonel Hamilton Smith saw a child bite a pug-dog till he yelled, without his manifesting the slightest ill-humour.

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But it is in none of the circumstances we have been hitherto describing that the dog has won the esteem and affection of mankind. He alone, of all the brute creation, shows a perfect attachment-alone understands our wishes, adapts himself to our habits,

waits upon our commands, associates with us as a friend. The service of man, while a single link of the connexion remains, is a necessity of his existence. The Siberian dogs, set free in summer to shift for themselves, though overtasked, treated with brutality, and nearly starved, return to their masters at the approach of winter to be harnessed to the sledge. The Pariah dog of India, when homeless and unowned, will fasten on a stranger, and exhaust every art to induce him to adopt it. Colonel Hamilton Smith tells of one that fixed his regards on a gentleman travelling rapidly in a palanquin, and continued to follow him with wistful eyes till he dropped with fatigue. No one can question that this disposition of the dog is a peculiar gift of Providence for the benefit of our race. Other animals surpass him in beauty and strength, yet in every quarter of the globe the dog alone is in alliance with man, because he alone is endowed with the 'impulse that renders him accessible to our advances, and submissive to our will. His domestication, in the opinion of Cuvier, is the most complete, the most useful, the most singular conquest we have achieved, and perhaps, he adds, essential to the establishment of society. Without his aid we should have been the prey of the beasts we have subdued. To use the happy expression of M. Blaze, the dog is a deserter from the enemy's camp, by whose assistance we have conquered the animated world. In our present civilized society we can hardly realize the extent of his early services. To learn his value we must observe the price that is set on him by savages. The Australian women have been seen to suckle pups at their bosoms. It is stated by Captain Fitzroy to be well ascertained that the natives of Tierra del Fuego, in times of famine, eat the oldest of their females rather than destroy a single dog. 'Dogs,' say they, catch otters; old women are good for nothing.' The chase, in fact, is the first need of man, and the first instinct of the dog. Dogs, when wild, form themselves into packs, hunt the boar and the buffalo, and even, upon occasion, the lion and the tiger. The cubs especially are the object of their unceasing warfare; and such is the terror they have in consequence inspired to the tiger, that in India the appearance of an ordinary spaniel excites his alarm.

The vast power and courage of certain races of the dog are truly extraordinary. The story told by Pliny of an Albanian dog of Alexander the Great, who conquered, one after another, a lion and an elephant, is probably a fable, like the addition of Ælian, that his tail, his legs, and his head, were severally amputated without loosening his hold, or producing even an appearance of pain. As little do we credit the feat of a mastiff in the reign of Elizabeth, who was reported to have fought and beaten

in succession a bear, a leopard, and a lion. But there are better grounds for believing that one of this species really engaged the king of beasts in the reign of Henry VII., who absurdly ordered him to be hanged for his presumption; and it has been frequently proved that three or four can carry off the victory. Colonel Hamilton Smith was witness of a scene between a bull-dog and a bison, in which the former seized the latter by the nose, and kept his hold till the infuriated animal crushed him to death. The terrier grapples with beasts of twenty times his size, and, however cruelly mangled, dies without a groan. It is thus that the dog, who provides the savage with food by his swiftness, protects him by his bravery. Such prowess and endurance belong to few of our domestic breeds. But nature developes the faculties which the occasion demands. The dogs that live amidst wilds and dangers are all conspicuous for hardihood, daring, and insensibility to pain. Their cunning and sagacity are in like manner proportioned to their needs. The dogs by the Nile drink while running, to escape the crocodiles. When those of New Orleans wish to cross the Mississippi, they bark at the river's edge to attract the alligators, who are no sooner drawn from their scattered haunts, and concentrated on the spot, than the dogs set off at full speed, and plunge into the water higher up the stream. An Esquimaux dog that was brought to this country was given to artifices which are rarely seen in the native Europeans, whose subsistence does not depend on their own resources-strewing his food round him, and feigning sleep, in order to allure fowls and rats, which he never failed to add to his store. But even with us the dogs who hunt on their own account display an ingenuity which is seldom attained by those who hunt for a master. The wily lurcher, who more than any other dog is addicted to poaching, when he puts up a rabbit, makes immediately for her burrow, and there awaits her arrival. M. Blaze had two dogs that hunted by stealth, of whom one started the hare, and the other, concealed behind a fence, pounced on her as she passed through her accustomed run. A story is told of a pointer and a greyhound who combined together—the greyhound availing himself of the scent of the pointer to find the game, the pointer of the speed of his associate to catch it. The pointer becoming suspected was furnished with a chain to impede his movements; and still continuing his roving life, it was at length discovered that the greyhound, to enable him to hunt as usual, carried the chain in his mouth, till he himself was called on to take up the chase. The skill of the common hound, though less striking, is still proportioned to the exigencies of the service, and is something more than a mere instinct; for when a young dog is entirely at fault, one experienced in the craft will detect the doublings of

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the fox or the stag, the devices to break the scent, or the attempts to divert it by starting another animal. It is practice which has taught him to unravel the intricacies of the chase, to distinguish between conflicting scents, to divine the ruse of a fugitive that is fertile in resources. In one thing, however, old dogs and young, tame dogs and wild, are all alike, and that is in the interest they take in the sport. The symptoms of preparation never fail to produce in them the most lively transports. The dog whose master is accidentally prevented from taking the field will often seek out a neighbouring sportsman, and enlist in his service for the day, though it would be a vain effort to entice him for any other object, and equally vain to attempt to retain him when the sport was at an end. Even in the company of his master, true as he is to his allegiance, he will attach himself for the occasion to a total stranger who chances to be a better shot; and yet, far from deriving any advantage from the result, he entertains a dislike for the bones of game, which he eats, when he eats them at all, with the reluctant air that shows them to be distasteful.

With many nations the dog adds to his own functions those of the horse. He is indifferently employed to hunt the rein-deer, the seal, and the bear, to carry burthens on his back, to draw his owner in the sledge. Pliny relates that the Colophonians in their wars had dogs to drag the baggage. A freak of Heliogabalus was to ride in a chariot drawn by a team of eight. But it is the Esquimaux, the people of Kamschatska, and of parts of Russia and America, that have used draught-dogs systematically, very nearly to the exclusion of the usual beasts of equipage or burthen. The adaptation of the dog to a duty for which he hardly appears to be intended by nature is not without its inconveniences. Either from the irresistible force of an instinctive propensity, or else from hunger (for they are so ill-fed that they have been known to eat their leather harness, and when free from trammels to devour one another), the team, which ordinarily consists of twelve, will start off at the scent of game, and, regardless of the driver, hurry him at the risk of his neck over every obstacle. The leaders, who are old dogs and better trained than the rest, are said by Von Wrangel to display in such conjunctures remarkable sagacity, pretending to have got upon a fresh scent, and seducing the hindermost by their affected eagerness into a false track. Besides these involuntary outbreaks of canine nature, bad usage has inspired some of them with such dislike to their masters, that they are for ever attempting in cooler moments to overturn the sledge. To compensate for the dangers to which they thus occasionally expose their drivers, they in common steer their way with undeviating accuracy, amid mist, darkness, and storms, through

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any path they have once travelled, and indicate, what no eye could trace, the hut buried in snow. At St. John's in Newfoundland, about two thousand of the fine dogs who take their name from the place transport heavy loads of wood and provisions, and in return for their labour, are left the half of the year in which they are not required, without a single morsel beyond what their own exertions can procure; and in the remainder, when at work, are so little cared for, that large numbers die of a species of plague that is generated by neglect. Here, and on the continent, dogs have been used on a smaller scale to drag hand-carts, though from the fright they occasion to horses, they have never been much approved of in large towns. For the sake of the dogs we shall rejoice to see the practice entirely prohibited elsewhere, as it has lately been here by Act of Parliament.

As a carrier of merchandise, the most delicate task which the dog has to perform is in the inland smuggling trade of the Continent. In this arduous service, which is constantly fatal to him, he shows a wonderful sagacity. Loaded with goods he sets out in the night, scents the Custom-house officer, attacks him if he can take him at a disadvantage, and conceals himself if escape is difficult, behind a bush or a tree. On his arrival at his destination he will not show himself till he has first ascertained that the coast is clear, and while he remains gives warning of the approach of the common enemy. It is manifest that a whole army of Custom-house officers can do little towards exterminating smugglers, of whom the supply is unlimited, who cross the frontiers in silence and darkness, whose road is the pathless wood and plain, who snuff danger in the wind, and who either evade it by their swiftness or find a lurking-place in every hedgerow.

We turn with pleasure from the illicit functions in which the monopoly of guilt and profit is to the man, and that of peril and suffering to his faithful animal. The shepherd's dog in his own department is a perfect miracle of intelligence. He understands the sign, the voice, the look of his master. He collects the scattered sheep at the slightest signal, separates any one that is indicated from the rest of the flock, drives them wherever he is told, and keeps them all the while under perfect control, less by his active exertions than by the modulations of his voice, which expresses every tone from gentle instruction to angry menace. These are his ordinary performances, visible every day in a thousand pastures. But he can do greater wonders. It chanced one night that seven hundred lambs, committed to the keeping of the Ettrick Shepherd, broke loose from his control and scampered away in three divisions over hill and plain. Sirrah, my man,' said Hogg mournfully to his colly, meaning it for an expression

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