COLOUR IN BIRDS AND QUADRUPEDS. 231 



change in the pelage of the Ermine, from white to brown. 

 The following is the only memorandum of this occurrence that I can 

 find in my diary. "April 17, 1814. My ermine has become a little 

 tamer, but all its beautiful white hairs are dropping out, and it begins 

 to look like a brown Weasel." I have endeavoured in vain to conjec- 

 ture the possibility of my having in some way been deceived in my 

 observations. The notes were made, I acknowledge, when I had no 

 knowledge of natural history, and had read no work on the subject ; 

 but, on the other hand, I had no favourite theory to support. That the 

 Ermine shed its hair at that early period, I feel confident, from another 

 circumstance. I was in the habit of combing out its white hairs, 

 which were continually falling off, and on one of these occasions it in- 

 flicted a wound with its teeth on my hand. Admitting, then, that my 

 observations were correct, and they happened, by a singular coincidence 

 of circumstances, to be made the very year, and within a few weeks of 

 the time when Dr Flemming examined the same species, it will not be 

 difficult to ascertain in what manner he had been deceived. The new 

 hair, both in the Ermine and the Northern and Polar Hares, comes out 

 iu spots, sometimes only of a few inches in diameter. It grows so ra- 

 pidly that it appears to attain its full length in less than a week. In 

 the meantime the surrounding hair may not yet have commenced 

 shedding, and remains of its former colour. This may account for the 

 white spots on the specimen examined by Dr Flemming, which, in all 

 probability, was a prepared skin. These parts of the animal had not 

 yet moulted, and therefore had undergone no change. With regard to 

 the wax-coloured hair of which he speaks, they must have been the old, 

 faded and soiled hairs of winter, as any one may easily ascertain by 

 examining the stuffed skin of an Ermine. The white pelage soon as- 

 sumes a yellowish cast. 



In the autumn of 1823 I had an opportunity of witnessing the 

 change of the Ermine from brown to its snowy mantle of winter. It 

 had been brought to Charleston by an itinerant showman. The cage, 

 I observed, was every where strewed over with brown hairs that had 

 dropped off. The young hairs were white in appearance, but whether 

 purely so at once, or became more blanched as the season advanced, I 

 had no means of ascertaining, as the Ermine was wild and vicious, and 



VI.— 3 H 



