Page:The power of the dog.djvu/93

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pretensions to breeding as justifiable. Probably if the French bulldog had never been imported we should have heard nothing of the miniature. Somewhere about 1893 the late Mr. G. R. Krehl exhibited a team of the small Parisians under the name of French Toy Bulldogs, but it did not take long to see that, whatever may have been the origin of these dogs, in the intervening years they had departed very materially from the accepted bulldog character. The wide, upward sweeping underjaw of the national breed was absent, and the ears! In the eyes of the orthodox these indispensable members were everything they should not be. The erect, commonly termed "tulip" or "bat" ear, surmounting the skull of an ordinary bulldog would be an enormity, so after much disputation the rival schools wisely decreed to go divergent ways, and to have their respective favourites christened Miniatures and French. Now that matters have settled down it is incontrovertible that this was the most sensible way out of the difficulty. Light weight and French bulldogs may all have sprung from the English Midlands, but, as a decade or two will suffice to establish a new type, by the time they were expatriated the Gallic dogs had departed in essentials from the type desired by English breeders. Our French friends, unfettered by tradition, and without the correct stamp in their minds, had evolved a creation of their own. There let it rest.

The intrusion, however, stimulated an endeavour to revive in