THE HARE. 55 



inoffensive in itself, it has no friend. Dogs of all kinds, as well 

 as foxes, pursue it, seemingly by instinct; wildcats, weasels, &c. 

 catch and destroy it ; birds of prey are still more dangerous 

 enemies ; while man, more powerful than all, makes use of every 

 artifice to obtain a creature, which constitutes one of the numer- 

 ous delicacies of his table. 



According to naturalists, the hare lives six or seven years, and 

 attains its full growth in one. It engenders frequently before it 

 is a year old. The buck seeks the doe principally from the 

 month of December to the month of April* The female goes 

 with young thirty or thirty- one days, and brings forth generally 

 two young ones, though they have been known to produce 

 three or four, and deposits them in a tuft of grass or heath, or 

 in a little bush, without any apparent preparation. 



The ridiculous assertions which some writers on natural his- 

 tory have made, viz. of hares being generally hermaphrodites, 

 or of their changing their sex every month, as well as of pos- 

 sessing the power of superfetation, are too glaringly absurd to 

 need a detailed refutation in this place. The circumstance which 

 seems to have given rise to the first of these notions is the forma- 

 tion of the genital parts of the male hare, whose testicles do not 

 obviously appear, especially when he is young, being contained 

 in the same cover with the intestines. Another reason is, that 

 on the side of the penis, which is scarcely to be distinguished, 

 there is an oblong and deep slit ; the orifice of which, in some 

 measure, resembles the vulva of the female. The male and 

 female are known to the sportsman by the following distinctions: 

 the head of the male is more short and round, the whiskers 

 long, the shoulders more ruddy, and the ears shorter and broader 

 than those of the female ; whose head is long and narrow, the 

 ears long and sharp at the tip, the fur on the back of a grey 

 colour, inclining to black, and in point of size she is frequently 

 found smaller than the male. There is also considerable differ- 



