Darwin gives numerous facts showing the effects of climate on horses, cattle, and sheep, in altering, more or less considerably, the characters of their ancestral stocks. He also gives the following remarkable case with regard to the rabbit. Early in the fifteenth century a common rabbit and her young ones were turned out on the island of Porto Santo, near Madeira. The feral progeny now differ in many respects from their parent stock. They are only about one-third of the weight, present many differences in the relative sizes of different parts, and have greatly changed in colour. In particular, the black on the upper surface of the tail and tips of the ears, which is so constant in all other wild rabbits of the world as to be given in most works as a specific character, has entirely disappeared. Again, "the throat and certain parts of the under surface, instead of being pure white, are generally grey or leaden colour," while the upper surface of the whole body is redder than in the common rabbit. Now, what answer have our opponents to make to such a case as this? Presumably they will answer that the case simply proves the action of natural selection during the best part of 400 years on an isolated section of a species. Although we cannot say of what use all these changes have been to the rabbits presenting them, nevertheless we _must_ believe that they have been produced by natural selection, and therefore _must_ present some hidden use to the isolated colony of rabbits thus peculiarly situated. Four centuries is long enough to admit of natural selection effecting all these changes in the case of so rapidly breeding an animal as the rabbit, and therefore it is needless to look further for any explanation of the facts. Such, I say, is presumably the answer that would be given by the upholders of natural selection as the only possible cause of specific change. But now, in this particular case it so happens that the answer admits of being conclusively negatived, by showing that the great assumption on which it reposes is demonstrably false. For Darwin examined two living specimens of these rabbits which had recently been sent from Porto Santo to the Zoological Gardens, and found them coloured as just described. Four years afterwards the dead body of one of them was sent to him, and then he found that the following changes had taken place. "The ears were plainly edged, and the upper surface of the tail was covered with blackish-grey fur, and the whole body was much less red; so that under the English climate this individual rabbit has recovered the proper colour of its fur in rather less than four years!" Mr. Darwin adds:--