18 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
so soon as hunting ceased to be a laborious and painful 
necessity, obligatory on the nomadic tribes for the support 
of life, it came to be followed as a sport, to be the delight 
of the warrior nobles, and, as game gradually became 
scarce and rare, to be regarded as the privileged preroga- 
tive of the crown. 
In the Bible, it is true, there is little mention of hunt- 
ing, either as a method of procuring meat, or as a pursuit 
of pleasure. Nimrod, the son of Cush, we are told, indeed, 
was a mighty hunter before the Lord, but the probability 
of the case would point to him as a destroyer of savage 
beasts, like Hercules and Theseus in Hellenic fable, rather 
than as one, 
With hound and horn his way who took 
To drive the fallow deer ; 
even if we do not regard him, in the wider light, as a 
hunter not of quadrupeds but of men, by the chase of 
whom “he began to be a mighty one in the earth.” 
Esau, again, we read of, somewhat as an exception 
among the pastoral people, over whom he was born a 
leader—although, partly in consequence of his addiction 
to this pursuit, which with him clearly must have been a 
sport rather than an occupation, he lost his hereditary. 
title—in the light, probably, of the first authenticated 
hunter of the deer. There are, however, many natural 
reasons, among which not the least is the sterile, rocky 
and rugged face of the country which they inhabited, why 
the children of Israel should never have acquired a taste 
for, or proficiency in, field sports, The horse, whose plia- 
