neighbours, and the latter, we may suppose,
their wits sharpened by adversity, gradually devising means of keeping
out of the robber's reach. In the artificial environment of a hunting or
shooting country, however, the fox will always prove too much for a bird
dulled by much protection, and the only possible _modus vivendi_ between
those concerned must rest on a policy of give and take that deliberately
ignores the facts of the case.

More interesting, on academic grounds at any rate, is the process of
education noticeable in pheasants in parts of the country where they
are regularly shot. Sport is a great educator. Foxes certainly, and
hares probably, run the faster for being hunted. Indeed the fox appears
to have acquired its pace solely as the result of the chase, since it
does not figure in the Bible as a swift creature. The genuine wild
pheasant in its native region, a little beyond the Caucasus, is in all
probability a very different bird from its half-domesticated kinsman in
Britain. I have been close to its birthplace, but never even saw a
pheasant there. We are told, on what ground I have been unable to trace,
that the polygamous habit in these birds is a product of artificial
environment; but what is even more likely is that the true wild pheasant
of Western Asia (and not the acclimatised bird so-called in this
country) trusts much less to its legs than our birds, which have long
since learnt that there is safety in running. Moreover, though it
probably takes wing more readily, it is doubtful whether it flies as
fast as the pace, something a little short of forty miles an hour, that
has been estimated as a common performance in driven birds at home.

The pheasant is in many respects a very curious bird. At the threshold
of life, it exhibits, in common with some of its near relations, a
precocity very unusual in its class; and the readiness with which
pheasant chicks, only just out of the egg, run about and forage for
themselves, is astonishing to those unused to it. Another interesting
feature about pheasants is the extraordinary difference in plumage
between the sexes, a gap equalled only between the blackcock and greyhen
and quite unknown in the partridge, quail and grouse. Yet every now and
again, as if resentful of this inequality of wardrobe, an old hen
pheasant will assume male plumage, and this epicene raiment indicates
barrenness. Ungallant feminists have been known to cite the case of the
"mule" phea