78 Bibliographical Notice. 



common hare (Lepus timldus), which also abounded in the same 

 woods and plantations. Pied examples of the former were of com- 

 mon occurrence every year, in the months of January and February ; 

 and during the exceptionally severe \^duter of 1860 we ourselves shot 

 one tliat was perfectly white, and it is now in our collection. In 

 juxtaposition is a Scotch specimen from Banffshire, exhibiting the 

 same snowy livery. We fully coincide in our author's remark that 

 " the assertion of Von Tschudi that mules between Lepus timidus 

 and Lepus variabilis are often met with in Switzerland is a state- 

 ment which seems to require further confirmation." Not a single 

 example of such a hybrid has ever been met with in Petworth Park. 



The vexed question as to whether the ferret {Mustela furio) is 

 specifically distinct from the polecat (M. putorius) receives but little 

 light in the volume before us. It is admitted to be " impossible to 

 point out any constant anatomical distinction between the animals, 

 and they are said to breed freely with one another ; on the other 

 hand, the intolerance of cold of the ferret has been considered as 

 evidence of its having been derived from an original stock brought 

 from Africa or some other tropical land." In accordance with this 

 latter belief in the exotic origin of the ferret, his portrait and bio- 

 graphy are consistently excluded from the pages of this edition. 



Mr. Colquhoun, the well-known author of ' The Moor and the 

 Loch,' in his ' Lecture on the Ferce Xaturce of the British Islands,' 

 expresses his belief that the dark ferrets so common in every rat- 

 catcher's hutch owe their dusky hue to polecat parentage. He says, 

 " Dark ferrets exactly resemble foumarts, only they are smaller and 

 of lighter shade. Many of these brown ferrets are half polecats ; 

 in fact the polecat is just a wild ferret." Now, if these " dark 

 ferrets " were ascertained to be prolific inter se, the identity of the 

 two supposed species would be proved. As we formerly observed in 

 our notice of Mr. Colquhoun's lecture*, " Surely this qucestio ve.vata 

 might easily be decided by experiment." 



" There is no rule," it is said, " without an exception ; " and that 

 which our author and his assistants have so laudably and generally 

 observed, of excluding our domestic and semidomesticated animals, 

 appears to us to have been transgressed in a single instance — that 

 of the fallow deer (Cervus dama), which was originally an inha- 

 bitant of Asia Minor and countries bordering the Mediterranean, and 

 therefere seems hardly to deseiwe a place among the ferce natures 

 of the British Islands, to which the red deer (Cervus eleiphus) and 

 the roe {C. capreolns) are of course entitled. We believe that the 

 new illustration of the former, in this edition, is from the gifted 

 pencil of the greatest zoological artist now living, whose well-known 

 portraits of living animals are beyond all praise. We sincerely wish, 

 however, that he had not, in a facetious moment, stuck such an ab- 

 normal pair of antlers on his stag. Horns of this fantastic, semi- 

 palmated character, though met with in continental collections, are 

 not typical of the species, are rare in the Scottish forests ; and the 



* Ann. .V- Mag. Nat. Ili.^t. 1^73. xi. p. 382. 



