It is important," reminds Ann Rogers Clark and Andrew Brace, "Not to claim great age for breeds, though it is quite legitimate to claim considerable antiquity for types of dogs."[11] The attempts to classify dogs into different 'species' shows that dog types could be quite distinctive, from the 'Canis melitaeus' of lapdogs descended from ancient Roman pet dogs to the even more ancient 'Canis molossus', the Molossan types, to the 'Canis saultor', the dancing mongrel of beggars. These types were uniform enough to appear to have been selectively bred, but as Raymond Coppinger wrote, "Natural processes can produce, could produce, and do produce populations of unusual and uniform dogs, that is, dogs with a distinctive conformation."[12] The human manipulation was very indirect. In a very few cases, Emperors or monasteries or wealthy hunters might maintain lines of special dogs, from which we have today Pekinese, St. Bernards, and foxhounds.At the beginning of the 1800s there were only a few dogs identified as breeds, but when dog fighting was outlawed in England in 1835, a new sport of dog showing began. Along with this sport came rules and written records and closed stud books. Some of the old types no longer needed for work (such as the wolfhound) were remade and kept from extinction as show dogs, and other old types were refined into many new breeds. Sometimes multiple new breeds might be born in the same littler of puppies.[13] In 1873 only 40 breeds and varieties were known;[14] today there are many hundreds of breeds, some 400 are recognized by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale
