380 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



March 27th, 1888, said, " Rabbits are a source of food-supply in 

 all the forest districts, and indeed throughout the whole region, 

 but die off periodically, as is the case further to the south and 

 west." 



Mr. F. Oliver, long resident at Edmonton, on the North 

 Saskatchewan, says (Report of Debates in Canadian Senate, 

 March 28th, 1888) :— 



" The Rabbit is, of course, found all over the wooded country of the 

 North- West, and is subject to phenomenal increase and to phenomenal 

 scarcity. Year after year they increase, until the country is fairly overrun 

 with them. The Indians can live well enough in these rich years, for even 

 blind men can kill enough for themselves. The Lynx, which lives on the 

 rabbits, and which the Indians eat (as well as all the meat-eating, fur- 

 bearing animals), increases greatly during rabbit years. Therefore, when 

 the rabbits are numerous, the Indians spend the winter in comparative 

 abundance. Then the rabbits decrease unaccountably — more rapidly than 

 they increase. One great supply of winter food is thus cut off from the 

 Indians themselves, and from the fur-bearing animals as well, which latter 

 soon become scarce, either through migration or death ; consequently, when 

 the rabbits are scarce times are doubly hard with the Indians. Sometimes 

 an abundance of deer makes up for the scarcity of rabbits, but occasionally 

 both deer and rabbits are scarce. Then the Indians starve." 



Mr. Donald Ross, of the Hudson's Bay Company, writes (I. c), 

 " Rabbits are very numerous at times in the North-West, but 

 they periodically die out, from a disease of the throat." 



Dr. J. G. Cooper says of an allied species, Lepus campestris 

 (Pacific Railroad Exploration Reports, vol. xii., pt. ii., p. 87), 

 M During our journey east of the Cascade Mountains, we saw 

 scarcely any hares, and the Indians told us that some fatal 

 disease had killed nearly all of them." 



Mr. C. Gibbs, writing of the same region, says (I. c, p. 131) : 

 " In 1853, we were informed by the Yakima Indians west of the 

 Columbia, that a very fatal disease had recently prevailed among 

 these animals, which had cut them almost all off." 



Prof. John Macoun, in his ' Manitoba and the Great North- 

 West' (London, 1883, p. 352), says:— 



" Hares, Lepus americanus, are abundant in the mixed prairie and 

 poplar forest that extends all the way across from Winnipeg to the Rocky 

 Mountains. Some years the country seems alive with them, while other 

 years scarcely one is to be seen. In 1872, the country in northern British 



