At a meeting of the first clubwhich went by the name of the Airedale Terrier Clubheld in Manchester some eighteen or twenty years ago, the following standard of perfection and scale of points was drawn up and adopted: * *

Naturally in the case of a breed which has departed from its original type, discussions were frequent before a standard of perfection for the Irish Terrier was fixed.

The heads of our Irish Terriers have also been brought nearer to a level of perfection, chiselled to the desired degree of leanness, with the determined expression so characteristic of the breed, and with the length, squareness, and strength of muzzle which formerly were so difficult to find.

It would need a council of perfection, indeed, to decide which is the better dog of the two.

Breeding up to the standard of excellence necessary in competition in dog shows has doubtless been the agent which has brought the Irish Terrier to its present condition of perfection, and it is the means by which the general dog owning public is most surely educated to a practical knowledge of what is a desirable and what an undesirable dog to possess.

On the formation of the Welsh Terrier Club a standard of perfection was drawn up and circulated with the club rules.

This being so, it is unnecessary to give many more names of dogs who have in their generations of some years back assisted in bringing the breed to its present state of perfection.

In the same year a joint committee drew up a standard of perfection for the breed, Messrs. J. B. Morison and Thomson Gray, two gentlemen who were looked upon as great authorities, having a good deal to do with it.

Heworth Rascal, who was a most symmetrical terrier, and probably the nearest approach to perfection in the breed yet seen.

COATVery important, and seldom seen to perfection; must be double-coated.

Certainly when he is seen in perfection he is an exceedingly beautiful dog.

Among the drop-eared Skyes of present celebrity may be mentioned Mrs. Hugh Ripley's Perfection, Miss Whishaw's Piper Grey, and Lady Aberdeen's Cromar Kelpie.

He may have given the breed its first impulse, but Mrs. M. A. Foster, of Bradford, was for many years the head and centre of all that pertained to the Yorkshire Terrier, and it was undoubtedly she who raised the variety to its highest point of perfection.

Of more recent examples that have approached perfection may be mentioned Mrs. Walton's Ashton King, Queen, and Bright, and her Mont Thabor Duchess.

If left intact, the tail would take two or three years to attain perfection, but the same may be said of the dog generally, which improves very much with age, and is not at its best until it is three years old, and even then continues to improve.

It is a breed which to be kept in perfection requires more than ordinary attention, not only on account of its silky jacket, which is peculiarly liable to become matted, and is difficult to keep absolutely clean without frequent washing, but also on account of a somewhat delicate constitution, the Maltese being susceptible to colds and chills.

For the Collies Southport Perfection and Ormskirk Emerald Mr. Megson paid a thousand sovereigns each.

At no other time, and in no other country, have the various canine types been kept more rigidly distinct or brought to a higher level of perfection.

The standards of perfection and scales of points laid down by the specialist clubs are usually admirable guides to the uninitiated, but they are often unreasonably arbitrary in their insistence upon certain details of formgenerally in the neighbourhood of the headwhile they leave the qualities of type and character to look after themselves or to be totally ignored.

His standard of ideal perfection is what he himself now is, a person of mediocre literary attainments: his utmost contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning.

Bacon was a man of a wide outlook, a rich, stimulating, impulsive nature, filled with great plans, but too mobile and desultory to allow them to ripen to perfection; Hobbes is slow, tenacious, persistent, unyielding, his thought strenuous and narrow.

And the existence of a plurality of causes is negatived by the supreme perfection which I conceive in the idea of God, the indivisible unity of his attributes.

The supreme perfection is the libertas non errandi.

" Monday brought the perfection of a traveler's morning.

Both of these types are as near perfection as a man can become.