34 PARTRIDGES 



The sober buff-brown and grey livery 

 of our most familiar game bird is too 

 well known among all country-dwellers 

 to demand any detailed description. It 

 was for long a popular and almost uni- 

 versal belief that the chestnut horse-shoe 

 on the breast was the distinguishing 

 mark of the cock partridge. This error 

 was duly set forth as a fact in the early 

 text-books on ornithology, and as solemnly 

 repeated in each succeeding work on 

 the subject, though a very superficial 

 acquaintance with anatomy and five 

 minutes' examination of some dead birds 

 would have served to put it right at any 

 time. 



But when writers are content to 

 accept their facts at second hand, without 

 any attempt to verify their accuracy, 

 mistakes once made are apt to linger 

 long and die hard. Thus it was only of 

 recent years that it has been shown that 

 the horse-shoe is not uncommonly absent 

 in the cock, and almost invariably present 

 among hens of the first year ; at the same 



