180 GRAY RABBIT. 



they usually He in hollo'w trees, and hardly ever stir from thence, unless 

 they be disturbed by men or dogs ; but in the night they come out and 

 seek their food. In bad w-eather, or when it snows, they lie close for a 

 day or two, and do not venture to leave their retreats. They do a great 

 deal of mischief in the cabbage-fields, but apple-trees suffer infinitely 

 more from them, for they peel off all the bark next to the ground. The 

 people here are agreed that the hares are fatter in a cold and severe 

 winter, than in a mild and wet one, for which they could give me several 

 reasons from their own conjectures. The skin is useless because it is so 

 loose that it can be dra^vn off ; for when you ^vould separate it from the 

 flesh, you need only pull at the fur and the skin follows. These hares 

 cannJ; be tamed. They were at all times, even in the midst of winter, 

 plagued with a number of common fleas." 



In 1820 (as we have observed in our article on L. Americanus) Des- 

 MAREST mistaking the species, gave a pretty good description of the Gray 

 Rabbit, and unfortunately referred it to L. Americanus. He had evident- 

 ly been misled by Foester, Schcepff, Pennant, Erxleben and Bodd, who 

 having confounded these two species, induced him to believe that as he 

 was describing an American hare, only one American species at that 

 time being kno\vn, it must be the one referred to bj' previous authors. 

 Hence he quoted Gmelin, Schcepff, Erxleben, Pallas and Bodd, and gave 

 to the species the extravagant geographical range, from Churchill, Hud- 

 son's Bay, to California, and assigned it a habitation in Xew- Albion, Loui- 

 siana, Florida, the two Carolinas, &c. Harlan, in giving an account of 

 the American quadrupeds in 1825, finding the Gray Rabbit described by 

 Desmarest, translated the article very literally, even to its faults, from the 

 French of that author, (See Encj-clopedie de Mammalogie, p. 351.) H.ae- 

 lan's translation represents the fur as " becoming whiter during winter, 

 but the ears and tail remaining always of the same gray." In the fol- 

 lowing year Godman (Amer. Nat. Hist., vol. ii., p. 157) once more described 

 this species under the (wrong) name of Lepus Americanus. In speaking 

 of its colour, he saj-s, " in winter the pelage is nearly or altogether 

 white," and he gives it the extraordinary weight of seven pounds. This 

 is rather surprising, as we know no city in the union where the market 

 in winter is better supplied -n-ith this species of hare than Philadelphia. 

 In this singular manner the Gray Rabbit, the most common and 

 best known of all the species of quadrupeds in America, had never re- 

 ceived a specific name that was not pre-occupied. In 1827, we proposed 

 the name of Lepus sylvaticus, and assigned our reasons for so doing in a 

 subsequent paper, (See Journ. Acad. Nat. Sc, vol. viii., part 1, p. 75.) In 

 1840, Dr. Emmoks also, (Report on Quadrupeds of Massachusetts,) de- 



