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