To this definition Ray subjoins, “nonnullis Scoticus,” as if he considered the Scotch greyhound of the same type—that there was, in short, only one variety—the English and Scotch being identical. The additional words would of course include the supplementary hound of Gesner’s Appendix, and probably were added with that intent.

Arrian’s work was unknown to the great German naturalist—not having been discovered in the Vatican library, when he compiled his celebrated Historia Animalium, nor indeed till a century later. That Ray, too, was unacquainted with the Greek Manual, seems equally clear. Thence the strong points of resemblance in the ancient and modern descriptions of a dog, hypothetically the same, impart the more interest, and obtain the more credence, from the impossibility of a collusive adaptation of the one to the other, and from both portraits corresponding with the images of the Celtic hound, which have come down to us on ancient monuments, the Arch of Constantine, gems, numismata, &c. &c.

See Arrian. de Venatione, c. xviii. εὖγε ὦ Κιῤῥὰ, εὖγε ὦ Βόννα, καλῶς γε ὦ Ὁρμή. These we may suppose to have been some of the names of the favourite archetypes of the Celtic kennel; but of the particular scene of their exertions we have no evidence to adduce. Born at Nicomedia, and occupied for the most part with civil and military engagements in the East, at a distance from Celtica, properly so called, (within the boundaries of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the Ocean,) we know not when or where Arrian became acquainted with the Vertragus. Was the hound existing in Asia Minor in the second century, seeing that he is noticed at a later period by the Greek poet of Cilicia, and the Platonic philosopher of Paphlagonia? The Celts themselves are found there, as colonists, at an early date—even in the very district of which Nicomedia was the metropolis. Stephanus of Byzantium mentions the Tolistoboii—ἔθνος Γαλατῶν ἑσπερίων μετοικησάντων ἐκ τῆς Κελτογαλατίας ἐς Βιθυνίαν. (See also Strabo Geogr. L. iv.) And other colonies are recorded by Strabo among the Thracians and Illyrians, Κελτοὺς τοὺς ἀναμεμιγμένους τοῖς τε Θρᾳξὶ καὶ τοῖς Ἰλλυριοῖς—the descendants of whom are perhaps the deer-coursers of Arrian’s 23rd chapter, whom I have there called Celto-Scythians: note 4. sub fine.

Although it is clear, almost to demonstration, that the greyhound was utterly unknown to ancient Greece in the days of the elder Xenophon, I readily allow that Greece may have been Arrian’s coursing-field, with the hound of Celtica, at a later period—an opinion supported by Janus Vlitius;—for into the south of Europe the dog had been introduced as a prodigy of speed—Gratii Cyneg. vs. 204.“ocyor affectu mentis pinnâque”—probably direct from the country of which he was indigenous, viz. Transalpine Gaul,De Venatione c. xxiii. τῆς Κελτικῆς Γαλατίας of Stephanus, (the Gallia Celtica of my annotations, without reference to Cæsar’s more limited appropriation of the term Celtica,) about the commencement of the Christian æra.

Τὰς κύνας τὰς γενναίας,—possibly the coarser and fiercer varieties of the Celtic hound—for Arrian seems to distinguish these noble-spirited dogs from the κύνα ἀγαθὴν, who, he says, may be destroyed by a stag.

The Celtæ with their colonies overran almost all Europe. We trace them from the pillars of Hercules to the extreme wilds of Scythia; the colonists of the latter territory alone being, correctly speaking, Celto-Scythæ;—but in consequence of the ignorance of the ancient Greek geographers as to the exact limits of either Celtica or Scythia, (as already remarked in my annotations on the second chapter of the Cynegeticus,) the term Celto-Scythians has been indefinitely applied to all the inhabitants of mid-Europe, from Celtica to Scythia.

It was Xenophon’s want of acquaintance with these African barbs, along with the Scythian galloways, and Celtic greyhounds, which led to the omission of them all, in hisArrian. de Venat. c. i. Cynegeticus: and to the lacunæ, thereby occasioned, in the older hunting-treatise, is to be attributed the supplementary one, written by the younger Athenian. But it is quite problematical whether hounds were employed at all in the Celto-Scythian and Libyan chases—indeed, it is my opinion, they were not:—for, though it be true, that Arrian recommends picked dogs, of high courage, for the stag-course, at the commencement of chapter 23, we hear nothing of hounds in the stag-chase, immediately following, on the πεδία εὐήλατα of Mœsia, Dacia, Scythia, &c.; where long-winded, and scrubby nags supply their place. And again, in the onager-chase of the Nomadic tribes of Libya, barbs alone are the pursuers, with boys upon their naked backs, continuing at full speed till the game be run down. So that οὕτω τοι θηρῶσιν, ὅσοις κύνες τε ἀγαθαὶ καὶ ἵπποι, κ. τ. λ. with which the author commences the period immediately following the description of the vanquished onager, must in part have a more remote reference than to the hunters spoken of in the same and preceding chapters—ὅσοις κύνες τε ἀγαθαὶ referring to the Celts of Western Europe, perhaps, and ἵπποι to the equestrians just before mentioned—the former class of sportsmen using swift-footed hounds, the latter horses alone. This interpretation harmonizes with Oppian’s description of the horses and hunters of Libya and Mauritania, and their chases, as already cited c. xxiv. note 8.

The Cynegeticus is contained in the third volume of this uncommon edition; which the writer regrets not to have seen till his translation was printed off. Its principal attraction is the novel annexation of some Greek Scholia by the editor, ingenious and explanatory. Those of the Cynegeticus, in a few instances, give a different interpretation of the text to what is given by the translator; but these are not very important.