MODERN TIMES. 317 



home without blood they richly deserved on many 

 days, solely owing to the impossibility of singling 

 out the hunted stag. On several occasions upwards 

 of a hundred stags, or at least deer with horns, 

 have been counted on the commons between 

 Cloutsham and Culbone Stables when hounds have 

 run across after a hind. The winter is the time to 

 see the stags, and no one who has not been hind- 

 hunting pretty frequently can form the least idea of 

 the numbers of deer in the country. 



All sorts of estimates have been made from time 

 to time of the number of deer, but it is extremely 

 difficulty to judge. In the old days, as we have 

 seen, the quota of fat stags for the Royal larder 

 demanded from Exmoor was twenty. Now, taking 

 the ordinary calculation on a Scotch forest that 

 one-eighth of the herd is the utmost that ought to be 

 killed, this would point to there having been on the 

 forest and in the purlieus at least three hundred and 

 twenty deer, since male and female calves are born 

 in about equal numbers. We find subsequently that 

 a hundred deer was the number reserved in a lease 

 of the forest, but in the time of Sir Thomas Acland 

 the number was estimated at three hundred, and at 

 two hundred when Lord Fortescue took over the 

 hounds in 181 2. Considering the number of deer 

 reported as killed and the waste from poaching and 

 other causes, these numbers were probably not far 

 wrong, though somewhat in excess of the actual fact. 

 When Mr. Bisset took the hounds in 1855 the 



