248 LEPORID^— LEPUS 



although laxly prosecuted, is taken as a matter of course, and 

 the description of a hunted hare in Venus and Adonis is prob- 

 ably the finest in the language. But it is a remarkable thing 

 that in France, the apparent land of the birth of coursing, 

 that branch of hare-hunting declined so much that an English 

 translator of Du Fouilloux's French treatise La Venerie, from 

 which in 1575 or thereabouts he compiled The Noble Arte of 

 Venerie, on account of the absence of any description of it in 

 the French work, was compelled to introduce an original chapter 

 on the subject. 



Coursing, as we understand it now, dates from the time 

 of Queen Elizabeth (Blaine, Encyc. Rural Sports, 1875, 

 562 and 584), in whose reign the first set of English rules 

 for determining a course were drawn up by Thomas, Duke of 

 Norfolk. No open trials were heard of, however, until half a 

 century later in the time of Charles I., and the oldest regular 

 coursing club, that of Swaffham, Norfolk, dates only from 1766 

 ("Coursing," Encyc. Brit., nth ed., unsigned). 



Hares were formerly taken with hawks, but this sport, like 

 hawking generally, is now, for practical purposes extinct in 

 England. It is practised, however, and is very popular in several 

 parts of the world, especially amongst some of the wilder Asiatic 

 tribes ; and it must have appealed strongly to the Greeks of 

 classical times, for the capture of a hare by a large bird of prey 

 was considered worthy of description by Homer [Iliad, xxii., 

 391), by the poet ^schylus in his tragedy The Agamemnon, 

 and by Aristotle (ed. Thompson, 191, ix., 32, 619^ 36, etc.), 

 the latter of whom refers to a particular raptorial bird as the 

 "hare-killer" {pp. cit., ix., 32, 6i8^ 30). 



According to Poland, there has not been in recent years 

 much traffic in British hare skins ; but in old days the reverse 

 must have been the case, since Fleming ^ states that as many as 

 thirty thousand — of course not all Brown Hares — have been 

 sold in Dumfries market in February. 



1 See also Robert Service, Scott. Nat., July 1891, 97-102. 



