MARCH HARES 79 



the hare's reputation for madness has been put 

 about by witnesses of these fights, in which there 

 are always some remarkable and arresting 

 passages. The combatants, for example, have a 

 habit of indulging in most astonishing sidelong 

 jumps which might well suggest that the animal 

 is " off its head." But these curious jumps are 

 not exclusively a feature of the love fights, and 

 the performance is not by any means confined 

 to the month of March. And at his maddest a 

 hare does not look half so mad as a tom-cat in 

 the throes of amorous sentiment, adding to many 

 wonderful contortions of body a vocal performance 

 more suggestive of all-gone insanity than anything 

 for which four-footed creature is responsible. 



The hare is pre-eminently our type of fleetness, 

 and it is interesting to speculate on the conditions 

 of life which evolved its remarkable powers in 

 this respect. Only the very swiftest of our dogs 

 can run a hare down, and it is doubtful if the one 

 surviving native British canine hunter, the fox, 

 could capture a hare which had a yard of a start. 

 Manifestly, therefore, the hare's wonderful run- 

 ning power is not an adaptation to existing con- 

 ditions. But as the hare existed in its present 

 form long before the human period, it is not a 

 matter of conjecture but of fact that the evolution 

 of its swiftness was an adaptation to a danger 

 present in a very old environment. That danger 

 was in all probability the wolf. Nearly two cen- 

 turies have passed since the slaying of the last 

 British wolf, but there was a time when wolves 

 roamed the British fields and woods in numbers, 



