The brown hare is essentially an animal of the open country, and more especially bare fields and fallows, with which its colour harmonises in a wonderful degree. And there is abundant need for this protective resemblance, as the hare has a host of enemies, against whom it has constantly to be on guard, and from whom its sole hope of escape depends upon its limbs. All the three protective senses, hearing, sight, and smell, are highly developed; the long ears detecting every audible sound, while the full, large, round eyes, with widely distended pupils, catch the smallest rays of light at night, when the hare is most active. It has been stated, indeed, that the eyes remain open during sleep, as the eyelids cannot be completely closed; but this is incorrect. Hares pass most of the day in a lair or “form,” which is a smooth place between tussocks of grass or other covert, but they may live out in the open. The females produce at least two litters during the year, the number of leverets in which usually varies from two to five, although it is stated there have been as many as eleven. The young are born quite active and with their eyes open; those which come into the world in spring being capable of breeding the same autumn. The mother remains with her offspring only for the first five or six days after their birth, and then leaves them to shift for themselves. The young hares of each litter remain together till half-grown, when they disperse; in fifteen months they attain full size, and their average duration of life is seven or eight years. Owing to their long hind-legs hares run much better uphill than downhill. THE POLAR BEAR (_Ursus maritimus_) Living amid eternal ice and snow, the polar bear, which is equalled in bodily size only by some of the huge brown bears of Alaska and Kamchatka, evidently owes its white, or in some instances pale cream-coloured, coat to its surroundings; this white livery, like that of the polar hare, being worn throughout the year. The species is always alluded to simply as the polar bear, although its full title should be the north polar bear; the Antarctic, so far as we know at present, having no land mammals. In its native haunts the polar bear is found alike on the ice-bound coasts and islands, and on the ice-fields themselves, where it obtains much of its food, this being captured both on land and in the water. Indeed, this great carnivore is fully as much at home in the sea as on _terra firma_, and is capable of swimming long distances at a stretch.