39 



the other he terms Stis scrofa palustris, the latter approaching 

 the type of Sus Indicus. 



I cannot conceive any animal more easily domesticated 

 than the pig, it will eat precisely the same food as man, it 

 will live in all respects in exactly the same conditions, 

 its fertility is very great, and unimpaired even by hybridiza- 

 tion, its habits are gregarious, it is not given to straying, 

 and generally seeks at night the shelter provided for it by 

 its owner, its value as an article of food is well known, and 

 its flesh can, by salting, be preserved for months, so that 

 man, by keeping pigs, has been enabled to lay up a store of 

 food for the winter months, no doubt a very important con- 

 sideration in the early condition of the human race. 



The Rabbit, the only useful domestic rodent, be- 

 longs to a very limited family of Mammalia, but one 

 genus is known, the species of which are numerous, 

 some forty have been described by naturalists, they 

 are found over the whole of the Northern Hemisphere, 

 a few species extend into Africa, and one is found as 

 far South in America as Brazil, but no species is 

 indigenous to Australia, although now so destructively 

 common there and in New Zealand, this " fact shows the 

 plasticity of its constitution, and the ease with which it can 

 even in the wild state adapt itself to altered conditions of en- 

 vironment, and as there is no doubt as to the wild rabbit, Lepiis 

 cimiculus, being the ancestor of the domestic, the life of a 

 rabbit in a hutch, where it can be kept in perfect health, and 

 that of its wild relatives on a bleak moor, affords a marked 

 contrast. 



The rabbit produces its young blind and naked, and 

 below the surface of the earth, the leveret is produced as 

 perfect in pelage and with its eyes as fully open as the hare, 

 it is singular that all the other species of the genus are hares, 

 but none are domestic, although as articles of food many are 

 very much better than the rabbit, but so far as my experienct; 

 goes, they are infertile in captivity and their wild habits are 

 ineradicable. 



