Even the familiar reference to the Sheepdog in the Book of Job"But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock"is not without a suggestion of contempt, and it is significant that the only biblical allusion to the dog as a recognised companion of man occurs in the apocryphal Book of Tobit (v. 16), "So they went forth both, and the young man's dog with them.

In that case it is very possible that the early progenitors of the breed were built upon a larger and more massive scale than is the sheepdog of to-day.