Dogs and All about Them

II. THE IRISH WATER SPANIEL.--There is only one breed of dog known in these days by the name of Irish Water Spaniel, but if we are to trust the writers of no longer ago than half a century there were at one time two, if not three, breeds of Water Spaniels peculiar to the Emerald Isle. These were the Tweed Water Spaniel, the Northern Water Spaniel, and the Southern Water Spaniel, the last of these being the progenitors of our modern strains. The history of the Irish Water Spaniel is in many ways a very extraordinary one. According to the claim of Mr. Justin McCarthy, it originated entirely in his kennels, and this claim has never been seriously disputed by the subsequent owners and breeders of these dogs. It seems improbable that Mr. Justin McCarthy can actually have originated or manufactured a breed possessing so many extremely marked differences and divergences of type as the Irish Water Spaniel; but what he probably did was to rescue an old and moribund breed from impending extinction, and so improve it by judicious breeding, and cross-breeding as to give it a new lease of life, and permanently fix its salient points and characteristics. However that may be, little seems to have been known of the breed before he took it in hand, and it is very certain that nearly every Irish Water Spaniel seen for the last half century owes its descent to his old dog Boatswain, who was born in 1834 and lived for eighteen years. He must have been a grand old dog, since Mr. McCarthy gave him to Mr. Joliffe Tuffnell in 1849, when he was fifteen years old; and his new owner subsequently bred by him Jack, a dog whose name appears in many pedigrees.