106 NATURAL HISTORY 
formed for diving that it makes great havoc among 
the inhabitants of the waters. Not supposing that 
we had any of those beasts in our shallow brooks, 
I was much pleased to see a male otter brought to 
me, weighing twenty-one pounds, that had been 
shot on the bank of our stream below the Priory, 
where the rivulet divides the parish of Selborne 
from Harteley Wood. 
r 
LETTER XXX. 
Selborne, Aug. 1, 1770. 
DEAR Sin,— THE French, I think, in general, are 
strangely prolix in their natural history. What 
Linnzus says with respect to insects, holds good in 
every other branch: “ verbositas presentis seculi,. 
calamitas artis.””* 
Pray how do you approve of Scopoli’s new work ? 
As I admire his Entomologia, I long to see it. 
I forgot to mention in my last letter (and had not 
room to insert in the former) that the male moose 
swims from island to island in the lakes and rivers 
of North America. My friend the chaplain saw 
one killed in the water in the river of St. Lawrence: 
it was a monstrous beast, he told me, but he did not 
take the dimensions. 
When I was last in town, our friend Mr. Bar- 
rington most obligingly carried me to see many 
curious sights. As you were then writing to him 
about horns, he carried me to see many strange and 
wonderful specimens. There is, I remember, at 
* The verbosity of the present age is the calamity of art. 
