206 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



on that of Ross-shire, and in the whole of Sutherland- and 

 Caithness-shires, and also in the Lews and that group, in Skye 

 and in the Orkneys. 



Elevation makes no difference to their instinctive habits, 

 which are clearly in-bred in the birds, and whether in the 

 same districts grouse are found at 2000 or at 100 feet above 

 sea-level their instinctive habits will be always those of the 

 district, and are not varied by hill and strath. 



What, then, is it that makes some birds lie for security 

 all the season, and others fly for security as soon as they can 

 use their wings ? It has been said that if you drive birds one 

 year you will always have to drive them, because it alters 

 their characters. The author held to that faith for years, but 

 has lived to see the error of his imaginings. It is very natural 

 to suppose, if you teach the parents to fly for life, that the 

 children will inherit the same habit also. But although the 

 author would be far from asserting, as some naturalists do, 

 that life-acquired habits are never transmitted, he knows that 

 they are not often transmitted, and thinks that the growing, 

 or rather grown, wildness of Yorkshire grouse can be amply 

 explained on the Darwinian theory of the survival and breeding 

 of the fittest. 



Early in the nineteenth century the celebrated Colonel 

 Hawker found the grouse so wild that he took himself back to 

 Hampshire, voting grouse in August a fraud. He only shot a few 

 that sat better than the rest, which implied that all those that 

 sat worse than the rest were saved for breeding. This natural 

 selection of the fittest went on for another fifty years, and then 

 people took to driving grouse because they could get them in 

 large quantities no other way. That seems simple enough ; 

 fifty or one hundred generations of selection of the wildest for 

 breeding, and of the youngest for the pot, made the Yorkshire 

 grouse breed earlier and breed wilder birds than before. 



There is a natural and obvious apparent difficulty in 

 accepting this theory, but it is only apparent and not real. 

 It is this : Why did not the grouse get wild in the same way 

 and degree in the Highlands and the Islands and in Caithness- 



