Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE NEWFOUNDLAND Around the Newfoundland centres a halo of romance hardly less bright than that investing the St Bernard. Both are life-savers, and, strange to say, both are importations so far as this country is concerned ; while they are two varieties of the Domestic dog that even the child is from very early times taught to venerate. As to whether Sebastian Cabot, when he discovered Newfoundland in 1497, found dogs of a remarkably large size and noble appearance, history is silent. No naturalist, sportsman, or other writer that treats of dogs before the end of last century says anything about the Newfoundlander, as he has sometimes been called. The European settlers in Newfoundland were at one time principally Irish and natives of the Channel Islands. The question arises, Did these settlers, or others from England or France, take with them dogs of a large sort from Europe, which, being crossed with the native dogs, improved the latter, and gradually formed a new variety ? It is not necessary to suppose this to have occurred in the earliest days of the settlement, for there has been a growing intercourse ever since, and the introduction of one or more of our large and superior races of dogs, from the beginning to the middle of the eighteenth century, would give ample time for the formation of a new breed of dog in Newfoundland, by commixture of their blood with that of the native race, before imported Newfoundland dogs became popular in this country. Writers constantly speak of the pure breed of dog indigenous to Newfoundland, and lament that he is now only to be met with mongrelised through crosses with inferior races. If the native inhabitants—the Mic Macs—possessed a dog of the high intellectual and moral character of the Newfoundland as now known, it wou...