The Queensland Naturalist. 
March, 1923 
diminish their numhers/' And agaiji (p. 142) : ‘‘These 
creatures multiply so prodigiously in countries which 
are proper for the breed, that the earth cannot furnish 
them with std>sisteuce ; they destroy herbs^ roots, grain, 
fruit, and ev(m trees and shrubs; and were it not for 
the use we make of the dog and the ferret, they would 
reduce the country to a desert.” 
The celebrated Italian anatomist, Spallanzani,* who 
lived aboiit the same period, writing of the Lipari Islands, 
asserts (21, Vol. 5, p. 128) that raibbits were the only 
animals found in Basiluzzo, and they “nearly' reduced to 
des])Hir the few inhabitants of the island b}’ the mischief 
they did I 0 their corn.” The p.eo[)le had resort to the 
im|)ortHtion of cals, Avhieh subdued the rabbits. 
In England, although the poet Draytonf wrote of 
rabb?ts in his day as “banish’d quite from every fertile 
place” (21, “Polyolhion, fourteenth song, lines ] 18/1- 14), 
they have, at times, amounted to a nuisance. The Ground 
Game Act. passed in 1880, permitted tenant farmers to 
kill rabbits on the land, but even since then they have 
done considerable damage. In the year 1898, for instance, 
“these animals amounted almost to a plague in som,e parts 
of England (28. p. 281). Himpson states that the loss 
caused by wild rabbits on estates' in Great P>riftaiii has 
been “simply appalling. There are nnmhers of estates 
on which the destruction to plantations by rabbits has 
far exceeded the damage from all other causes put to- 
gether” (24, p. 5). 
Even at the present day it is necessary, at times, to 
destroy them in Great Britain, and quite recently it was 
urged that cultivations be protected by legislation from 
the ravages of rabbits, it being argued that a much 
larger area of land would be cultivated if this were done. 
In the United v^tates of America they destroy 
grape vines and garden crops, and are regarded as 
‘“serious* j>est‘s to fruit growers on account of their 
fondness for the hark of trees and the tender growth of 
nursery stock,” and it has been found that their “per- 
sistent destruction of small seedling trees interferes ser- 
iously Avitli etfeets of the Forest Service to re-forest 
mountain slopes” (1. p. 11). 
* Lazaro Spallanzani, A.D, 1729-1799. 
t Michael Drayton, A.D. 1563*1631. 
