224 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 
A farm will perfectly support a certain proportion 
of hares, and where none are allowed to live and 
there is great hostility to game generally, the farming 
will usually be found to be bad. I have seen, in 
certain parts of Scotland, where the tenants were all 
anti-Game Law Radicals, some of the worst crops 
imaginable. There were tons of weeds, but not a 
hare to be found, and very little of any other game. 
The hare, with his four or five pounds of good 
flesh, and useful skin, is too valuable an animal to be 
treated as vermin, but he should never be allowed to 
disturb friendly relations with good farmers, nor to 
interfere with the interests of the partridge. 
The many wonderful records given in chapters ii. 
and viii., vol. i, of ‘Shooting,’ in the Badminton 
Library may be studied with interest, and give rise to 
some reflections and comparisons. In the Holkham 
totals, for instance, it will be observed that in the 
years 1797, 1798, and 1800 more partridges were killed 
on the estate than in 1868 and 1869, the two best 
seasons of that decade. There are several scores, which 
I need not here reproduce, proving that very large bags 
of partridges were made at the end of the last and 
the beginning of the present century, both on the 
Continent and in Great Britain. A little later the 
totals of partridges begin to deteriorate, and those of 
