. ix.] WILD RABBITS. 183 



some spotted animals may be observed. Capt. Sulivan remarks, 

 that the difference in the prevailing colours was so obvious, that in 

 looking for the herds near Port Pleasant, they appeared from a long 

 distance like black spots, whilst south of Choiseul Sound they 

 appeared like white spots on the hill-sides. Capt. Sulivan thinks 

 that the herds do not mingle ; and it is a singular fact, that the 

 mouse-coloured cattle, though living on the high land, calve about 

 a month earlier in the season than the other coloured beasts on the 

 lower land. It is interesting thus to find the once domesticated 

 cattle breaking into three colours, of which some one colour would 

 in all probability ultimately prevail over the others, if the herds 

 were left undisturbed for the next several centuries. 



The rabbit is another animal which has been introduced, and 

 has succeeded very well ; so that they abound over large parts of 

 the island. Yet, like the horses, they are confined within certain 

 limits; for they have not crossed the central chain of^iills, nor 

 would they have extended even so far as its base, if, as the Gauchos 

 informed me, small colonies had not been carried there. I should 

 not have supposed that these animals, natives of northern Africa, 

 could have existed in a climate so humid as this, and which enjoys 

 so little sunshine that even wheat ripens only occasionally. It is 

 asserted that in Sweden, which any one would have thought a more 

 favourable climate, the rabbit cannot live out of doors. The first 

 few pair, moreover, had here to contend against pre-existing enemies, 

 in the fox and some large hawks. The French naturalists have 

 considered the black variety a distinct species, and called it Lepus 

 Magellanicus.* They imagined that Magellan, when talking of an 

 animal under the Hame of " conejos " in the Strait of Magellan, 

 referred to this species ; but he was alluding to a small cavy, which 

 to this day is tlms called by the Spaniards. The Gauchos laughed 

 at the idea of the black kind being different from the grey, and 

 they said that at all events it had not extended its range any further 

 than the grey kind ; that the two were never found separate ; and 

 that they readily bred together, and produced piebald offspring. 



* Lesson's Zoology of the Voyage of the Coquille, torn. i. p. 168. All 

 the early voyagers, and especially Bougainville, distinctly state that the 

 wolf-like fox was the only native animal on the island. The distinction of 

 the rabbit as a species, is taken from peculiarities in the fur, from the shape 

 of the head, and from the shortness of the cars. I may here observe that 

 the difference between the Irish and English hare rests upon nearly similar 

 characters, only more strongly marked. 



