Simon Carnell - Hare

Even allowing for the degree to which works of pre-eighteenth-century natural history contain mistaken and eccentric material regarding most animals (the mole has only one drop of blood in its body; swallows nest underwater in winter; the sloth takes a month to climb a tree, and so on), the hare receives some remarkably colourful and extensive treatment in such works. Aelian, in his On Animals, maintained that male as well as female hares gave birth, and that the hare sleeps with its body alone while it continues to see with its eyes enjoying this advantage over all other animals.

Pliny writes in his Natural History that alpine hares turn white because they eat snow; that a deaf hare will sooner feed and grow fat, than another that heareth, and reports the popular belief that hare flesh causeth them that feed upon it to look fair, lovely, & gracious, for a week together afterwards.

Medicinal uses of the hare continued throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. To such an extent, in fact, that

In seeking to dispense with vulgar errors concerning hares, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Sir Thomas Browne takes up the vexed question of their sex-changing, and concludes that they do change their sex, but sometimes, and not in that vicissitude or annual alteration as is presumed.anatomy there ensueth a necessity of retrocopulation, with the male and female facing in opposite directions when mating. Browne has extricated himself from the tradition of associating the hare with lustfulness, but cannot resist a piece of moralizing by way of conclusion, albeit one which turns the usual association on its head. Hares copulate this way out of necessity: only humans have devised a variety of sexual positions for their sinful delectation.

By the time we reach the Histoire naturelle, gnrale et particulire (17491788) of the Comte de Buffon, one of the key works of popularizing natural history to come out of the Enlightenment, the belief about gender-shifting in hares has been dropped, along with much else besides. Though not the idea that they sleep with open eyes and steer with their ears or that they are the fastest land mammal. And even here the history of speculation about the sexuality of hares takes an odd turn, under the guise and in the name of close and scientific observation. For Buffon, hares are as equally lascivious as they are fertile. The glans of the clitoris is prominent, and nearly as large as that of the male penis. This super-sexed female hare is also said by him to be in possession of