This rabbit infliction is of awful dimensions here. We saw them by the thousand, bobbing about among the dry withered thistle-stalks, and many hundreds of tons of skins are exported from Otago and Southland every year. On some runs as many as fifty men are employed laying poison and collecting skins. The skins almost pay for the outlay, but of course the check to the wool industry cannot be formulated in figures. The skins are most valuable naturally when the winter fur is on them. There is so much difficult country hereabouts where the vermin can breed in safety, that they will never now be wholly eradicated, but already they are being sensibly held in check, and meantime the poor people comfort themselves with the thought, that after all, employment is given to many hundreds of hands, and money is of necessity spent in the country which might otherwise only swell the hoards of absentee squatters, and rich corporations. The poison used is phosphorized grain. For flat country, where the warrens are easily accessible, and the soil not too porous, probably no better means of checking the plague has been found than that promulgated by an old fellow-student of my own, whom I had the pleasure of meeting again in Dunedin after a long separation of more than twenty years.
I refer to Professor James G. Black, Professor of Chemistry in the Otago University. Some nine years ago the rabbit plague was working havoc with the prospects of pastoralists in Southland; and one of the leading squatters, Mr. James
