When variously coloured rabbits are set free in Europe, and are thus placed
under their natural conditions, they generally revert to the aboriginal
grey colour; this may be in part due to the tendency in all crossed
animals, as lately observed, to revert to their primordial state. But this
tendency does not always prevail; thus silver-grey rabbits are kept in
warrens, and remain true though living almost in a state of nature; but a
warren must not be stocked with both silver-greys and common rabbits;
otherwise "in a few years there will be none but common greys surviving."
(4/20. Delamer on 'Pigeons and Rabbits' page 114.) When rabbits run wild in
foreign countries under new conditions of life, they by no means always
revert to their aboriginal colour. In Jamaica the feral rabbits are
described as having been "slate-coloured, deeply tinted with sprinklings of
white on the neck, on the shoulders, and on the back; softening off to
blue-white under the breast and belly." (4/21. Gosse 'Sojourn in Jamaica'
1851 page 441 as described by an excellent observer, Mr. R. Hill. This is
the only known case in which rabbits have become feral in a hot country.
They can be kept, however, at Loanda (see Livingstone 'Travels' page 407).
In parts of India, as I am informed by Mr. Blyth, they breed well.) But in
this tropical island the conditions were not favourable to their increase,
and they never spread widely, and are now extinct, as I hear from Mr. R.
Hill, owing to a great fire which occurred in the woods. Rabbits during
many years have run wild in the Falkland Islands; they are abundant in
certain parts, but do not spread extensively. Most of them are of the
common grey colour; a few, as I am informed by Admiral Sulivan, are hare-
coloured, and many are black, often with nearly symmetrical white marks on
their faces. Hence, M. Lesson described the black variety as a distinct
species, under the name of Lepus magellanicus, but this, as I have
elsewhere shown, is an error. (4/22. Darwin 'Journal of Researches' page
193; and 'Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle: Mammalia' page 92.) Within