The likeness of the domestic Dog to his more immediate relatives is very close. Except in the want of obliquity in the eyes, and in the curling of the tail, so different to the straight “brush” of a Wolf or wild Dog, there is really no definite character which can be given as separating _Canis familiaris_ from the wild species of the genus. Moreover, the difference between the varieties of the Dog itself is so great, that it is impossible to frame anything like a good definition which will include the Bulldog, the Greyhound, the Newfoundland, and the Terrier, and, at the same time, exclude the Dingo and the Búansú. The one constant difference is the habit of barking, “which is almost universal with domesticated Dogs, and which does not characterise a single natural species of the family.” The Dog certainly took its origin at a very remote period, for we find undoubted evidence of his existence and regular domestication in the very earliest records. Among the early Hebrews, he seems to have been unknown, or rather, despised; and it strikes one as a most remarkable circumstance that this astute nation of shepherds should never have domesticated so useful an assistant. Possibly this is partly owing to the prejudice the grand old Theists of Palestine must have felt against an animal held in great veneration as an emblem of the Divine Being by the idolatrous Egyptians; and yet this objection can hardly have had much weight, as the Hebrews kept Oxen, animals which were regularly worshipped by the Egyptians. Throughout the Old and New Testaments the Dog is spoken of with scorn and contempt as “an unclean beast,” so that probably the Israelites had the misfortune only to know this friend of man in the character in which he now appears in Constantinople--as the common scavenger of the neighbourhood. The only instance in the Bible in which the Dog is mentioned as a domesticated animal is in that magnificent drama, the Book of Job, a poem of great antiquity, and very possibly not of Hebrew origin. The suffering patriarch, after recounting to his “friends” the greatness of his former prosperity, says: “But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.” This passage is extremely remarkable, as showing at what an early period of the world’s history the Dog was sufficiently domesticated to be capable of the arduous task of guarding Sheep--a task, the proper performance of which necessitates the total suspension of the true canine instinct, which is not to guard and protect the Sheep, but to worry and devour them.