THE DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMAL LIFE. gr 



their characteristic being lost by interbreeding with, 

 the imported cats. The variety has some curious 

 points, its peculiarities being not limited to the absence 

 of tail. It is exceptionally savage, and the hind legs 

 are often unusually long, giving it a hopping gait 

 so like a rabbit's that local naturalists, innocent 

 of zoology, and vague in their ideas about nature's 

 possibilities, have been known to class the creature as 

 a hybrid between the cat and the rabbit. Local tradi- 

 tion states that the Spanish cats were of that pale 

 sandy colour, not very common among English cats, 

 which is sometimes called Judas colour, as the nearest 

 approach to red hair that cats can manage. This 

 colour, at any rate, is now among the commonest 

 colours of the island cats, both as an all-over colour, 

 and in patches, and both with and without the accom- 

 paniment of a tail. It is worth while remarking, that 

 the ship from the Armada contributed additions also 

 to the human inhabitants of the island, some of whose 

 descendants still preserve their pedigree. Such immi- 

 grants, wrecked on an island where the people were 

 ignorant of maritime arts, might have supplanted the 

 aborigines, like the cats ; but a seafaring people, for 

 obvious reasons, do not share the weakness of island 

 races, and can hold their ground against all intruders, 

 or even, as in the case of the English nation, maintain 

 their own, and also possess themselves of what is not 

 their own, on foreign ground. 



But in considering the distribution of animals, we 

 have to consider not only the effect of the existing 



