HARES AND RABBITS 213 



eyes open, fully covered with hair, and able to run about.^ The 

 rabbit, moreover, burrows into the ground and inhabits these 

 burrows, whereas the typical hares live above-ground. Closely 

 allied to the European rabbit, however, is a remarkable primitive 

 type of Leporine, the Assam hare {Lepus or Oryctolagus hispidus\ 

 which has short ears, a fur tending in colour to the rabbit gray, and 

 other resemblances in the skull. Also related is the South African 

 form, Lepus crassicaudatus^ and the Lepus sylvilagus of North and 

 South America. Professor Scharff believes that the rabbit type 

 originated in or near North America, and that its allies penetrated 

 westwards into Central Asia, while the rabbit itself travelled 

 eastwards across the Atlantic by a now vanished land bridge into 

 Western Europe and Northern Africa. Many problems in the 

 fauna of Europe and North America, and above all of the Azores, 

 Madeira, and Canary Islands, are difficult to explain, unless we 

 can postulate the existence during the close of the Tertiary Epoch 

 of a land bridge across the Northern Atlantic. The equatorial 

 isthmus which may have connected Venezuela with West Africa 

 had probably broken down at the commencement of the Miocene 

 period ; but a good deal of the North Atlantic bed may have 

 risen to be dry land between North America and Western Europe 

 by way of the Azores and Madeira. This would have been at a 

 time when Spain was connected with the south-west of Ireland. 

 By this route the ancestors of the rabbit must have travelled and 

 have reached the vanished land lying to the west of Portugal 

 now restricted to the Madeira and Azores Archipelagoes. In the 

 Azores rabbits undoubtedly existed when the islands were first 

 discovered by Flemish merchants. Rabbits also have been 

 known to exist in Madeira, or in the little islands off Madeira, 

 from the time of their discovery by the Portuguese. It has 

 always been assumed that the Portuguese must have introduced 

 rabbits into both archipelagoes, together with weasels and goats. 

 Goats they certainly brought to Madeira, but it is a moot 

 question whether the existing wild goat of the Azores may not 

 be an indigenous wild species connected with the wild goat of 

 ^ There is also a difference in the structure of the csecum. 



