252 DELIBERATE INTRODUCTION OF NEW ANIMALS 



increase of travelling and of written descriptions of the country 

 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the evidence be- 

 comes unwieldy, and each item in itself of less significance in 

 the general movement. The trend of the evidence is none 

 the less clear that the Rabbit continued to spread more and 

 more rapidly, partly through natural migration and still more 

 by deliberate introduction or transportation to new areas. 

 There are records of the planting of many fresh colonies in 

 the latter half of the eighteenth century, while some counties, 

 such as Kincardineshire, did not know the Rabbit until its 

 deposition there in the first quarter of the nineteenth 

 century. 



Two factors made for its success and rapid increase in 

 the later centuries : first, the great strides which have taken 

 place in the improvement of agriculture and in the con- 

 sequent increase of the yield of the soil, for the increase of 

 the farmer's crops is an increase of the Rabbit's food; and 

 second, the growing attention paid to the preservation of 

 sporting animals, and the consequent destruction of the very 

 creatures which kept the Rabbit (as well as the Pheasant 

 and the Grouse) in check the Fox, the Polecat, Stoat and 

 Weasel, the Eagles and Hawks, and in more distant days, 

 the Wolf. 



So it is that even at the end of the eighteenth century we 

 find it established throughout most of the mainland and in the 

 islands from the Lowland counties of Berwick and Rox- 

 burgh, Dumfries and Ayrshire, through the midlands of 

 Fife, Clackmannan, Kinross and Stirling to the wilds of 

 Perth and Argyll, Easter Ross, Sutherland and Caithness. 

 Many of the writers in the Old Statistical Account (1792-8) 

 describe it as "rare" or as a newcomer, but in some places it 

 was very common. About this time, at the warren of Dowally 

 near Dunkeld, the tacksman killed a yearly average of 125 

 dozen; in one year at Stromness 36,000 rabbit skins were 

 sold, at $>d, each ; and in the last century as many as 200,000 

 skins have been sold in a winter at Dumfries (see also under 

 "Destruction," p. 166). 



Need more be said to prove the success of the introduc- 

 tion of the Rabbit from the point of view of acclimatization ? 

 Perhaps only that its firm establishment and increase in 

 number have made it so destructive to crops that in 1917 a 



