An article called "Curious Foreign Dogs" in Every Woman's Encyclopaedia (1910-1912) included this photo of a chihuahua that had been displayed at a British dog show.

The article's author said, "The Chihuahua is rarely seen in this country. The writer has known but two, one of which was worth more than its weight in gold, for it could stand on the palm of a man's hand. Indeed, said that full-grown dogs of this breed known to scale only twenty-three ounces."

Now obviously to us, the twenty-three ounce chihuahua was a puppy, but it was common in those days to misrepresent the tiny breed as tinier still. Virtually all the early references claim the first specimens in England weighed less than four pounds. The author of "Curious Foreign Dogs" actually attempted, by further mythifying, to explain the discrepency between exaggerated size claims, and the actual sizes:

"A more usual weight, however, is from three to four pounds. In its native province of Chihuahua. Mexico, the dog is tiny. but bred in other lands, it "degenerates" into a bigger, heavier type almost at once."

After the breed was really well known, it would be understood that the typical weights were in the six to twelve pound range, or larger, with eight to ten pound specimens predominant. Those which weigh four pounds tend to be short-lived runts with renal or neurological problems. But just as today a chihuahua not fully grown is placed in a teacup, photographed, and advertised as a "teacup" strain that gets no bigger than that, minimizing chihuahua size falls into the same recantour arena as fishermen who maximize the size of the one that got away.

And so far from being 24-ounces in their native Mexico but "degenerating" into larger dogs when Brits get them, all that was really being observed was puppies fobbed off as full grown, the new owners unwilling to admit they were hornswoggled.