156 THE SHOOTER'S GUIDE. 



seven years, and attains its full growth in one. It en- 

 genders frequently before it is a year old. The buck 

 seeks the doe principally from the month of Decem- 

 ber to the month of March. The female goes with 

 young thirty or thirty-one days, and brings forth ge- 

 nerally 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 preparation whatever. 



The ridiculous assertions which some writers on 

 natural history have made, viz. of hares being gene- 

 rally hermaphrodites, of their changing their sex 

 every month, &c. are too glaringly absurd to need a 

 detailed refutation in this place. The circumstance 

 which seems to have given rise to these strange con- 

 jectures is the formation 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 

 pudendum of the female. Sportsmen, therefore, sel- 

 dom look at the genital parts of a hare to distinguish 

 its sex, but resort to other marks by which this point 

 is more easily ascertained. Thus, the head of the 

 male is more short and round, the whiskers longer, 

 the shoulders more ruddy, and the ears shorter and 

 broader, than those of the female ; the head of which 

 is long and narrow, the ears long and sharp at the tip a 



