202 THE BROWN HARE. 



a new coat to suit a landscape which has changed 

 in colour. It is not a matter of ten years, or 

 yet of ten hundred, but of unchanged conditions 

 throughout immeasurable time, that produces in- 

 herited knowledge. 



The wolf and the coyote have learnt the meaning 

 of strychnine and of the buried trap, and how to 

 evade them. They have changed with the times ; 

 they have become modernised, and thus have 

 managed to hold their own. But in their case 

 the experience of the parents is handed on to the 

 children ; only thus have they survived, and the 

 hare is denied the privilege which comes to them 

 as a birthright. He is a creature of the open, 

 trusting solely to his superb powers of flight to 

 evade his foes. Denied the benefit of the experi- 

 ence of his parents, he will make for the open 

 so long as he is pursued, and will fall to the 

 poacher at the gap or the gateway at which his 

 mother and his mother's mother fell. 



A good many hares are killed on the railway- 

 lines, and a railway workman employed in Norfolk 

 told me that in the early summer, when the young 

 hares of the season are first abroad, he procured 

 many a Sunday dinner in the shape of a partly 

 mangled hare found on the line. Evidently 

 they run in front of the train just as they run 

 ahead of an automobile on the road, sticking to 

 the open way instead of turning aside and so out 

 of danger. An old hare, however, is seldom killed 

 thus, just as an old partridge is seldom killed by 

 flying into the telegraph-wires. 



MATING. 



March is the hare's love-making season ; hence 

 the saying, ' Mad as a March hare ! ' Hares are 



