Natural History of Porto Santo

Abstract

THE Island of Porto Santo, one of the Madeira group, is probably best known to biologists on account of the famous rabbit still found commonly there. Darwin showed that the animal differed conspicuously from the English rabbit, and inferred that it had evolved into a new race since its introduction into the island some hundreds of years ago. Haeckel gave it a distinctive name, Huxleyi. It is, indeed, a distinct race or subspecies from the English rabbit, but zoologists had failed to observe that it was identical with the Lusitanian animal, which had not then been segregated by them. Thus the Porto Santo rabbit loses its importance as evidence of evolution, being, in fact, the South European subspecies of Oryctolagus cuniculus.