I pass in silence the two large families which include the jerboa, the chinchilla, the biscacha, and the tushkan, or underground hare of South Russia, though all these small rodents might be taken as excellent illustrations of the pleasures derived by animals from social life.(15) Precisely, the pleasures; because it is extremely difficult to say what brings animals together—­the needs of mutual protection, or simply the pleasure of feeling surrounded by their congeners.  At any rate, our common hares, which do not gather in societies for life in common, and which are not even endowed with intense parental feelings, cannot live without coming together for play.  Dietrich de Winckell, who is considered to be among the best acquainted with the habits of hares, describes them as passionate players, becoming so intoxicated by their play that a hare has been known to take an approaching fox for a playmate.(16) As to the rabbit, it lives in societies, and its family life is entirely built upon the image of the old patriarchal family; the young ones being kept in absolute obedience to the father and even the grandfather.(17) And here we have the example of two very closely-allied species which cannot bear each other—­not because they live upon nearly the same food, as like cases are too often explained, but most probably because the passionate, eminently-individualist hare cannot make friends with that placid, quiet, and submissive creature, the rabbit.  Their tempers are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship.

Life in societies is again the rule with the large family of horses, which includes the wild horses and donkeys of Asia, the zebras, the mustangs, the cimarrones of the Pampas, and the half-wild horses of Mongolia and Siberia.  They all live in numerous associations made up of many studs, each of which consists of a number of mares under the leadership of a male.  These numberless inhabitants of the Old and the New World, badly organized on the whole for resisting both their numerous enemies and the adverse conditions of climate, would soon have disappeared from the surface of the earth were it not for their sociable spirit.  When a beast of prey approaches them, several studs unite at once; they repulse the beast and sometimes chase it:  and neither the wolf nor the bear, not even the lion, can capture a horse or even a zebra as long as they are not detached from the herd.  When a drought is burning the grass in the prairies, they gather in herds of sometimes 10,000 individuals strong, and migrate.  And when a snow-storm rages in the Steppes, each stud keeps close together, and repairs to a protected ravine.  But if confidence disappears, or the group has been seized by panic, and disperses, the horses perish and the survivors are found after the storm half dying from fatigue.  Union is their chief arm in the struggle for life, and man is their chief enemy.  Before his increasing numbers the ancestors of our domestic horse (the Equus Przewalskii, so named by Polyakoff) have preferred to retire to the wildest and least accessible plateaus on the outskirts of Thibet, where they continue to live, surrounded by carnivores, under a climate as bad as that of the Arctic regions, but in a region inaccessible to man.(18)