66 EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 



as many as a hundred rabbiters employed on a single property whose 

 working average was from three hundred to four hundred rabbits per 

 day. As they received five shillings a hundred from the station owner, 

 and were also able to sell the skins at eight shillings a hundred, their 

 profession was most lucrative. Seventy-five dollars a week was not 

 an uncommon wage, and many an unfortunate squatter looked with 

 envy upon the rabbiters, who were heaping up modest fortunes, while 

 he himself was slowly being eaten out of house and home. 



''The fecundity of the rabbit is amazing, and his invasion of remote 

 districts swift and mysterious. Careful estimates show that, under 

 favorable conditions, a pair of Australian rabbits will produce six 

 litters a year, averaging five individuals each. As the offspring them- 

 selves begin breeding at the age of six months, it is shown that, at this 

 rate, the original pair might be responsible in five years for a progeny 

 of over twenty millions. That the original score that were brought to 

 the country have propagated after some such ratio, no one can doubt 

 who has seen the enormous hordes that now devastate the land in 

 certain districts. In all but the remoter sections, the rabbits are now 

 fairly under control; one rabbiter with a pack of dogs supervises 

 stations where one hundred were employed ten years ago, and with 

 ordinary vigilance the squatters have little to fear. Millions of the 

 animals have been killed by fencing in the water holes and dams during 

 a dry season, whereby they died of thirst, and lay in enormous 

 piles against the obstructions they had frantically and vainly striven 

 to climb, and poisoned grain and fruit have killed myriads more. A 

 fortune of £25,000 offered by the New South Wales Government still 

 awaits the man who can invent some means of general destruction, 

 and the knowledge of this fact has brought to the notice of the various 

 colonial governments some very original devices. 



"Another great pest to the squatters is developing in the foxes, 

 two of which were imported from Cumberland some years ago by a 

 wealthy station owner, who thought that they might breed, and 

 give himself and friends an occasional day with the hounds. His 

 modest desires were soon met in the development of a race of foxes 

 far surpassing the English variety in strength and aggressiveness, 

 which not only devour many sheep, but out of pure depravity worry 

 and kill ten times as many as they can eat. When to these plagues is 

 added the ruin of thousands of acres from the spread of the thistle, 

 which a canny Scot brought from the Highlands to keep alive in his 

 breast the memories of Wallace and Bruce; the well-nigh resistless 

 inroads of furze; and, in New Zealand, the blocking up of river? by 



