CHAPTER XV

THE IRISH WOLFHOUND


It is now some thirty years since an important controversy was carried
on in the columns of _The Live Stock Journal_ on the nature and
history of the great Irish Wolfhound. The chief disputants in the
discussion were Captain G. A. Graham, of Dursley, Mr. G. W. Hickman,
Mr. F. Adcock, and the Rev. M. B. Wynn, and the main point as issue
was whether the dog then imperfectly known as the Irish Wolfdog was
a true descendant of the ancient _Canis graius Hibernicus_, or whether
it was a mere manufactured mongrel, owing its origin to an admixture
of the Great Dane and the dog of the Pyrenees, modified and brought
to type by a cross with the Highland Deerhound. It was not
doubted--indeed, history and tradition clearly attested--that there
had existed in early times in Ireland a very large and rugged hound
of Greyhound form, whose vocation it was to hunt the wolf, the red
deer, and the fox. It was assuredly known to the Romans, and there
can be little doubt that the huge dog Samr, which Jarl Gunnar got
from the Irish king Myrkiarton in the tenth century and took back
with him to Norway, was one of this breed. But it was supposed by
many to have become extinct soon after the disappearance of the last
wolf in Ireland, and it was the endeavour of Captain Graham to
demonstrate that specimens, although admittedly degenerate, were
still to be found, and that they were capable of being restored to