MARCH HARES 81 



line. They have merely to zigzag upwards, while 

 the shooters are posted at or near the top. The 

 hares will with one mind ascend from danger. 

 It is a good case in which an instinct acquired for 

 the avoidance of a particular dangerous emergency 

 comes into play to the owner's undoing on the 

 stimulus of any kind of danger whatever. 



To many people the hare and the rabbit are 

 such close allies as to be hardly distinguishable, 

 and the resemblances are certainly very real and 

 considerable. Cousins by descent, they have the 

 same general protective colouration and the same 

 general shape. But considering the close genetic 

 connection, the differences are really very astonish- 

 ing and deep. The flesh of a pig does not differ 

 more completely from that of a deer than the flesh 

 of a hare does from that of a rabbit, and when it 

 is remembered that both animals derive from a 

 common ancestor and subsist on the same kind 

 of food and live in the same climate, the difference 

 is one which the evolutionary physiologist finds it 

 far from easy to explain. 



There is an equally marked, though by no means 

 so difficult to account for, difference in the mode 

 of production of the young of the two species. 

 Rabbits, as at any rate every country schoolboy 

 knows, produce young which are naked, blind, 

 and helpless. The young hare, on the other hand, 

 is born complete, clothed, with its eyes open, and 

 capable of running almost at once. Like the young 

 plover, it is also born with its hiding instincts 

 fully developed, and within an hour of birth the 

 members of a hare family know enough to scatter 

 6 



