on no account be allowed to degenerate into a race of mere house
companions or toys.

Small-sized Spaniels, usually called Cockers, from their being more
especially used in woodcock shooting, have been indigenous to Wales
and Devonshire for many years, and it is most likely from one or both
of these sources that the modern type has been evolved. It is probable
too that the type in favour to-day, of a short coupled, rather "cobby"
dog, fairly high on the leg, is more like that of these old-fashioned
Cockers than that which obtained a decade or two ago, when they were
scarcely recognised as a separate breed, and the Spaniel classes were
usually divided into "Field Spaniels over 25 lb." and "Field Spaniels
under 25 lb." In those days a large proportion of the prizes fell
to miniature Field Spaniels. The breed was not given official
recognition on the Kennel Club's register till 1893, nor a section
to itself in the Stud Book; and up to that date the only real
qualification a dog required to be enabled to compete as a Cocker
was that he should be under the weight of 25 lb., a limit arbitrarily
and somewhat irrationally fixed, since in the case of an animal just
on the border-line he might very well have been a Cocker before and
a Field Spaniel after breakfast.

It is not easy to find authentic pedigrees going back further than
a quarter of a century, but Mr. C. A. Phillips can trace his own
strain back to 1860, and Mr. James Farrow was exhibiting successfully
thirty-five years ago. The former gentleman published the pedigree
of his bitch Rivington Dora for eighteen generations _in extenso_
in _The Sporting Spaniel_; while the famous Obo strain of the latter
may be said to have exercised more influence than any other on the
black variety both in this country and in the United States.

It was in 1880 that the most famous of all the "pillars" of the Cocker
stud, Mr. James Farrow's Obo, made his first bow to the public, he
and his litter sister Sally having been born the year before. He won
the highest honours that the show bench can give, and the importance
of his service to the breed both in his owner's kennel and outside
it, can scarcely be over-estimated. Nearly all of the best blacks,
and many of the best coloured Cockers, are descended from him. At
this period the type mostly favoured was that of a dog rather longer
in the body and lower on the leg than it is at present, but the Obo
family marked a progressive step, a