The Wolf And The Dog Analysis

There is no incongruity in the idea that in the very earliest period of man's habitation of this world he developed a friend and companion of some sort of aboriginal representative of our modern dog, and that in return for its help in protecting him from wilder animals, and in guarding his sheep and goats, he gave it a share of his food, a corner in his dwelling, and grew to trust it and care for it.

Believably the animal was originally little else than an unusually gentle jackal, or an ailing wolf driven through its companions from the wild marauding pack to seek shelter in alien surroundings. One can well conceive the possibility of the partnership beginning in the circumstance of some helpless whelps being brought dwelling house by the early hunters to be tended and reared through the women and children. Dogs introduced into the dwelling as playthings for the children would grow to
In order properly to interpret this question it is necessary first to consider the identity of structure in the wolf and the dog. This identity of structure may best be studied in a comparison of the osseous system, or skeletons, of the two animals, which so closely resemble each other that their transposition would not easily be detected.

The spine of the dog consists of seven vertebrae in the neck, thirteen in the back, and seven in the loins, three sacral vertebrae, and twenty to twenty-two in the tail. In both the dog and the wolf there are thirteen pairs of ribs, nine true and four false. Each has forty-two teeth. They both have five front and four hind toes, tho' outwardly the common wolf has so much the appearance of a large, bare-boned dog that a popular description of the one would serve for the