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The Museum Gazette 



support of it the depredations of rabbits on the bark of trees 

 will be noted. Holly and ivy are the trees attacked by pre- 

 ference, and of the latter the white gnawed stems are now 

 very conspicuous in our Haslemere hedges and copses. So 

 long as there is no snow the rabbits prefer grass and let the 

 ivy alone, or it may be they have in previous winters eaten 

 the bark as high up as they could reach. A thick fall of snow 

 not only drives them to this resource, but enables them to 

 mount higher up to get at it. 



HOW THE STOAT BECOMES AN ERMINE. 



The manner in which the brown Stoat of summer changes 

 into the white Ermine of winter, is a matter deserving of careful 

 observation. It may possibly not be uniform but as far as 

 our observation has gone it is not through any stage of general 

 greyness, but by the formation of white patches on the sides 

 of the body which gradually extend and coalesce until only a 

 band down the middle of the back and the whole of the upper 

 part of the head remain brown. The whole of the tail loses its 

 colour before the parts named, excepting of course the tip, 

 which remains jet black. There is a splendid collection of well- 

 stuffed animals showing various stages of change from brown 

 through piebald to white, in the local museum at Geneva. 

 Most museums have a few specimens, but unfortunately, it 

 is but rarely chronicled in what month the animal was killed. 

 It may be of interest to some of our readers to know that Mr. 

 Gardner, the naturalist salesman in Oxford Street, displays at 

 present in his window two excellent specimens of what we 

 have described above. They are almost equally good as 

 museum specimens, but the mounting is supposed to be 

 better in the one than the other. He asks three guineas 

 for one, and thirty shillings for the other, and they are well 

 worth the money. 



Have any of our readers in the South of England seen 

 Ermines this winter ? We cannot hear that any have been 

 killed at Haslemere. It is an open question whether the 

 severity of the winter has any influence on the change. 



