I9I4. 
Reviews. 
145 
naturally intermingle, and never intergrades or overlaps in characters. 
When transported to localities inhabited by other hares, as the Island of 
Mull, and Vaynol Park. North Wales, it retains its distinctness. It 
appears to have directly descended from the late Pleistocene L. anglicus ; 
the relationship implies a geologically recent connection between England 
and Ireland." 
It is probable that this reasoning would not be accepted at first sight 
by zoologists of a lumping tendency, without fuller information as to, 
for instance, the length of time for which the Irish Hare has been known 
to " retain its distinctness " when " transported to localities inhabited 
by other hares " so nearly allied to itself as the Blue Hare of Scotland. 
On another page, however, we are given the supplemental information 
that the colony on the Island of Mull, where the Scottish and Irish Hares 
may still be seen together and keep their specific characters, dates from 
the introduction of twelve specimens from Wicklow " about i860," and 
so has retained its characteristics for a sufficient time to give considerable 
strength to Major Barrett -Hamilton's argument. 
Of that singularly interesting and, until lately, much neglected animal 
the Lesser or Pygmy Shrew {Sorex mimUiis) the account given is somewhat 
shorter than might have been desired. Although many interesting 
particulars are given— some of them on the strength of the author's own 
personal and careful investigation, and others as the result of the important 
researches carried on by Messrs. L. E. Adams, G. H. Caton Haigh, A. H. 
Cocks, and other students of the lesser forms of British mammalian life — 
still, the statement that " in its habits, so far as our scanty knowledge 
goes, the Pygmy does not differ widely from the Common Shrew," cannot 
but strike the reader as somewhat unsatisfactory, in view of the remarkable 
abundance of the Common Shrew in Great Britain — where Mr. Cocks 
regards it as " probably by far the most numerous mammal in the British 
Isles " — and the comparative scarcity of the smaller species, not only in 
England, where it might be looked on as kept down in numbers by the 
competition of its larger relative, but also in Ireland, where it has no 
other Shrews to compete with, and might therefore be expected, if really 
similar in its ways to Sorex araneus, to become as common, or nearly 
so, as that species is where it prevails. Some unascertained but important 
difference in habits must, one would think, exist to explain this difference 
in the numbers of the two animals, and the need for further close attention 
to the ways of Shrews is evident. 
Major Barrett -Hamilton accepts as proven nearly to demonstration the 
conclusion arrived at by Mr. Lionel x\dams^ that Shrews are " annuals," 
and that the autumnal mortality of both 5. araneus and S. minutus is 
due simply to the fact of the entire adult shrew population having reached 
the term of their natural life. Mr. Adams made out, as was shown in 
this Journal, a strong case for this remarkable conclusion, and no facts, 
so far as we are aware, have since come to light that are (jul of harmony 
with it ; but the possibility that a few of the older Slircwb hibernate 
^ Mem. and Proc. Manchester Lit. and Philosoph. Soc, liv., lo, 1-13. 
See also Irish Naturalist, vol. xix., pp. 121 -6. 
