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Show 6 PROF. B. C. A. W1NDLE AND MR. J. HUMPHREYS [Jan. 14, deterred us from proceeding further in our enquiry had not the Professor courteously and kindly encouraged us to pursue our investigations. Besides a number of skulls which we have procured ourselves we have examined those in the following collections :- The Natural History Department of the British Museum ; the Royal College of Surgeons, London ; the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin ; and the Museum of Science and Art in the last-named city. W e have to express our thanks to the following gentlemen for their kind assistance in this matter:-Mr. Oldfield Thomas, Professor Charles Stewart, Dr. Arthur Thomson; Professors Alexander Macalister, H . W . Macintosh, and A. C. Haddon. It is right to mention that the very numerous calculations required for the preparation of the tables have been worked out by Mrs. Windle. In dealing with our subject we have been confronted with two chief difficulties. In the first place, it was originally our hope and intention to have dealt with the origin of the races of the domestic dog, but a short experience of the literature of the subject showed this to be an impossibility on this occasion at least. The literature of the subject would require the devotion of years before any satisfactory results could be hoped for. W e have therefore been regretfully obliged to confine ourselves to some scattered references to the opinions of the chief writers on the subject, whether as regards the derivation of the race as a whole or of certain varieties from one another. In the second place, the difficulty of determining the limits of breeds or varieties of dogs, and still more that of deciding whether a given museum-specimen is that of a so-called "pure-bred " animal or even of absolutely defining what is a "pure-bred animal," is one which will be readily comprehended by anyone who is even superficially acquainted with the ways of canine fanciers. Anyone taking the trouble to lock through the pages of' Stonehenge,' for example, will not fail to realize that fanciers have exercised their ingenuity in many directions upon most of the commoner breeds of dogs, and by no means always on the same lines. This fact is doubtless, sufficient to account for the striking discrepancies and' differences which, as will be seen from the tables, exist amongst dogs of the same variety. As an example, it may be stated that in few is this more the case than in that of the Bull-dogs, and yet the skulls included in this table are nearly all specially vouched for as being those of exceptionally purely-bred individuals. W e can only state that, so far as we have been able, we have included in the tables only such animals as apparently might be with reason described as " rm.P bred." P e" In the first part of this paper will be found the measurements of the various specimens examined, reduced to terms of the basi-cranial axis in each case, with averages, arranged in a tabular form |