It would be difficult and foreign to the object of this work fully to trace the early history of the dog. Both in Greece and in Rome he was highly estimated. Alexander built a city in honour of a dog; and the Emperor Hadrian decreed the most solemn rites of sepulture to another on account of his sagacity and fidelity. The translator of Arrian imagines that the use of the 'pugnaces' (fighting) and the 'sagaces' (intelligent)--the more ferocious dogs, and those who artfully circumvented and caught their prey--was known in the earlier periods of Greek and Roman history, but that the 'celeres', the dogs of speed, the greyhounds of every kind, were peculiar to the British islands, or to the western and northern continents of Europe, the interior and the produce of which were in those days unknown to the Greeks and Romans. By most authors who have inquired into the origin of these varieties of the dog, the 'sagaces' have been generally assigned to Greece--the 'pugnaces' to Asia--and the 'celeres' to the Celtic nations. [The vertragi, 'canes celeres', or dogs that hunted by sight alone, were not known to the ancients previous to the time of the younger Xenophon, who then describes them as novelties just introduced into Greece: "But the swift-footed Celtic hounds are called in the Celtic tongue [Greek: ouéztragoi]; not deriving their name from any particular nation, like the Cretan, Carian, or Spartan dogs, but, as some of the Cretans are named [Greek: diaponoi] from working hard, [Greek: itamai] from their keenness, and mongrels from their being compounded of both, so these Celts are named from their swiftness. In figure, the most high-bred are a prodigy of beauty; their eyes, their hair, their colour, and bodily shape throughout. Such brilliancy of gloss is there about the spottiness of the parti-coloured, and in those of uniform colour, such glistening over the sameness of tint, as to afford a most delightful spectacle to an amateur of coursing." It is probable these dogs were carried, about this time, into the southern parts of Europe by the various tribes of Celts who over-ran the continent, and also occupied Ireland, Britain, and the other western islands, and ultimately took possession of Gaul.--L.] Of the aboriginal country of the latter there can be little doubt; but the accounts that are given of the English mastiff at the invasion of Britain by the Romans, and the early history of the English hound, which was once peculiar to this country, and at the present day degenerates in every other, would go far to prove that these breeds also are indigenous to our island. Oppian thus describes the hunting dog as he finds him in Britain: