504 Mr. Rennie on the Contrivances 



could scarcely have failed to observe it. If such a covering, 

 however, had existed, it must have been destroyed at the exit 

 of the hare. 



White of Selborne, in describing the severe season of 1776, 

 still remembered in popular chronology as the Frosty Harvest, 

 says, * the hares lay sullenly in their seats, and would not 

 move till compelled by hunger ; being conscious, poor animals, 

 that the drifts and heaps treacherously betray their footsteps, 

 and prove fatal*.' It is by no means unlikely that this was 

 the case with the hare which I started ; for I could perceive no 

 foot-prints to or from her little nest ; but if she did move out 

 to forage, she must have gone at least a couple of miles to 

 the nearest farmyard, at Whitehaugh, where she had every 

 chance to be shot while tasting the rip of corn usually hung 

 out about the hedges for this purpose ; in which way, indeed, I 

 had seen one killed the previous night at Waterhead farm. It 

 may be true, as the older authors affirm, that hares never feed 

 near home, e either,' says Gesner, ' because they are delighted 

 with foreign food, or else because they would exercise their 

 legs in going ; or else, by secret instinct of nature, to conceal 

 their forms and lodging-places unknown f.' 



The great naturalist of the middle ages, Albertus Magnus, 

 says, that hares feed only in the night, because their heart 

 and blood is cold ; but evidently speaking, as was heretofore 

 the custom, on mere conjecture ; for the fact is well known, 

 and one of the most extraordinary in the animal economy, 

 though by no means as yet satisfactorily explained, that the 

 interior heat of quadrupeds varies extremely little in the coldest 

 and in the hottest climates. To the uneducated it appears no 

 less erroneous to say, that the body is equally warm on a cold 

 winter's morning as on the most sultry of the dog-days, as to 

 affirm the sun is stationary, contrary to the apparent evidence 

 of the senses, yet the one is as well ascertained as the other. 

 For example, Captain Parry found, that when the air was 

 from 3 to 32 at Winter Isle, lat. 66 ir N., the interior 

 temperature of the foxes when killed was from 106f to 98 J ; 

 and at Ceylon, Dr. Davy found that the temperature of the 



* Nat, Hist, of Selborne, lett. 1C6. f Gesner, as above, p. 209. 



Second Voyage, p. 157, 



