There are, moreover, historic proofs that the dogs of the strongest breeds are indigenous to Asia, where we still find the dog of Thibet, the most colossal of all; in fact, in Pliny we read the following narrative:  Alexander the Great received from a king of Asia a dog of huge size.  He wished to pit it against bears and wild boars, but the dog remained undisturbed and did not even rise, and Alexander had it killed.  On hearing of this, the royal donor sent a second dog like the first, along with word that these dogs did not fight so weak animals, but rather the lion and the elephant, and that he had only two of such individuals, and in case that Alexander had this one killed, too, he would no longer find his equal.  Alexander matched this dog with a lion and then with an elephant, and he killed them both.  Alexander was so afflicted at the premature death of the first dog, that he built a city and temples in honor of the animal.

Did the mountainous province of Epirus called Molossia, in ancient Greece, give its name to the molossi that it produced, or did these large dogs give their name to the country?  At all events, we know that it was from Epirus that the Romans obtained the molossi which fought wild animals in the circuses, and that from Rome they were introduced into the British islands and have became the present mastiffs.

Although our hunting and shepherd’s dogs have a European and the mastiffs an Asiatic ancestry, the ancestry of the harriers is African, and especially Egyptian; in fact, in Upper Egypt we find a sort of large white jackal (Simenia simensis) with the form of a harrier, and which Paul Gervais regarded with some reason as the progenitor of the domestic harrier, and a comparison of their skulls lends support to this opinion.

A study of the most ancient monuments of the Pharaohs shows that the ancient Egyptians already had at least five breeds of dogs:  two very slim watch dogs, much resembling the harrier, a genuine harrier, a species of brach hound and a sort of terrier with short and straight legs.  All these dogs had erect ears, except the brach, in which these organs were pendent, and this proves that the animal had already undergone the effects of domestication to a greater degree than the others.  The harrier of the time of the Pharaohs still exists in great numbers in Kordofan, according to Brehm.

Upon the whole, we here have, then, at least three stocks of very distinct dogs:  1, a hunting or shepherd’s dog, of European origin; 2, a mastiff, typical of the large breed of dogs indigenous to Asia; and 3, a harrier, indigenous to Africa.

We shall not follow the effects of the combination of these three types through the ages, and the formation of the different breeds; for that we shall refer our readers to a complete work upon which we have been laboring for some years, and two parts of which have already appeared.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Les Races des Chiens, in La Bibliotheque de l’Eleveur.]