A woman, after hearing Bertrand Russell describe the structure of the universe said, "Very clever young man, but the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise, and it's turtles all the way down."

She was wrong. Actually, it's dogs all the way down. North of Barcelona, in a medieval church I saw two small lions holding up a sarcophagus, but the itinerant sculptors who worked on the churches hadn't seen any real lions and those lions are dogs with manes. I have seen working dogs everywhere, supporting Chinese temples and French drainpipes, hunting Italian dragons and guarding the dead in Mexican, Etruscan and Egyptian tombs.

These clay dogs, the Carlas, are not monumental, but they are from a pack of important little dogs, made to hold up New York.