The dog was not greatly appreciated in Palestine, and in both the Old and New Testaments it is commonly spoken of with scorn and contempt as an “unclean beast.”  Even the familiar reference to the Sheepdog in the Book of Job—­“But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock”—­is not without a suggestion of contempt, and it is significant that the only biblical allusion to the dog as a recognised companion of man occurs in the apocryphal Book of Tobit (v. 16), “So they went forth both, and the young man’s dog with them.”

The pagan Greeks and Romans had a kindlier feeling for dumb animals than had the Jews.  Their hounds, like their horses, were selected with discrimination, bred with care, and held in high esteem, receiving pet names; and the literatures of Greece and Rome contain many tributes to the courage, obedience, sagacity, and affectionate fidelity of the dog.  The Phoenicians, too, were unquestionably lovers of the dog, quick to recognise the points of special breeds.  In their colony in Carthage, during the reign of Sardanapalus, they had already possessed themselves of the Assyrian Mastiff, which they probably exported to far-off Britain, as they are said to have exported the Water Spaniel to Ireland and to Spain.

It is a significant circumstance when we come to consider the probable origin of the dog, that there are indications of his domestication at such early periods by so many peoples in different parts of the world.  As we have seen, dogs were more or less subjugated and tamed by primitive man, by the Assyrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, as also by the ancient barbaric tribes of the western hemisphere.  The important question now arises:  Had all these dogs a common origin in a definite parent stock, or did they spring from separate and unrelated parents?

Half a century ago it was believed that all the evidence which could be brought to bear upon the problem pointed to an independent origin of the dog.  Youatt, writing in 1845, argued that “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 was descended from no inferior and comparatively worthless animal; and that he was not the progeny of the wolf, the jackal, or the fox, but was originally created, somewhat as we now find him, the associate and friend of man.”

When Youatt wrote, most people believed that the world was only six thousand years old, and that species were originally created and absolutely unchangeable.  Lyell’s discoveries in geology, however, overthrew the argument of the earth’s chronology and of the antiquity of man, and Darwin’s theory of evolution entirely transformed the accepted beliefs concerning the origin of species and the supposed invariability of animal types.