2i8 BRITISH MAMMALS 



In the summer-time, between April and November, the 

 woolly, soft fur of the mountain hare is fulvous-gray, the under 

 hair being almost bluish-gray, with longer hairs on the surface 

 that are yellowish-brown. The backs of the ears are gray and the 

 tips are black. The belly is dirty white, and the under parts 

 generally range between gray and white in tint. The tail is dark 

 ^ray above and white beneath. In the northern parts of Scotland 

 the mountain hare assumes the snow-white coat which this animal 

 bears during the winter season in the Alps and the Arctic regions. 

 Only the tips of the ears remain black. But in Ireland (the 

 mountain hare is extinct in England) this change to complete 

 white is never known to occur. The utmost amount of white 

 recorded in the winter change of the mountain hare in Ireland is 

 represented by the author's drawing, which is done from a specimen 

 in the Natural History Museum, Dublin. In this case the face and 

 a broad band along each side of the back remained grayish-brown,, 

 whilst the rest of the body became white. This, however, is a ver)r 

 rare example, and ordinarily the mountain hare in Ireland only 

 turns a somewhat bluer gray in the winter. There are remarkable 

 colour variations of this hare in Ireland. One of them, confined 

 to the county of Wicklow, assumes a uniform coat of sandy yellow. 

 The mountain hare at the present day has its habitat in these 

 islands reduced to Scotland and Ireland, but during the Pleistocene 

 Epoch it equally inhabited England, where, indeed, it seems to 

 have preceded the arrival of the common hare. Elsewhere than 

 these islands its distribution includes Scandinavia, Northern Russia, 

 Siberia, and Japan. It is also met with in the Pyrenees, the Alps,, 

 and the Caucasus, possibly also in the Carpathians. In Northerrk 

 America it is represented by the closely allied, if not identical, 

 " polar " hare, the distribution of which scarcely extends farther 

 south than Canada. 



The mountain hare is the only type of Leporine found in 

 Sweden and Norway. In the days when Linnaeus endeavoured 

 to bring zoological nomenclature into an orderly condition, fine 

 distinctions were seldom drawn between species of animals nearly 

 allied : consequently it never occurred to Linnaeus, or those that 



