The Mammalian Fauna of the Edinburgh District. 111 
North Esk, on which one was killed near Eskbank in 1890, 
and another seen at Newhall five or six years since; Glen- 
corse reservoir and Logan burn, in the Pentlands, where one 
was captured in 1886, and the marks of another seen the 
winter before last; the Tweed, between Peebles and Inner- 
leithen, and at various other points in its course; the 
Almond, both near its mouth and higher up; and the Carron, 
in Stirlingshire. I have also quite recently seen one from 
near Callander, and J. Gilmour, Esq. of Montrave, informs 
me it is still not uncommon in Fife. 
From Sir Robert Sibbald we learn that in the end of the 
seventeenth century, when he wrote his “ History of Fife and 
Kinross,” “the sea-otter, which differeth from the land-otter, 
for it is bigger, and the pile of its furris rougher,” inhabited 
the Firths of Forth and Tay (1803 ed., p. 114); but I am not 
aware that the Otter now occurs in the waters of these arms 
of the sea. In the volumes of the “ Old Statistical Account” 
the Otter is frequently mentioned. For instance, in vol. xviil, 
p. 374, it is stated that they “used to frequent Duddingston 
Loch,” which they have probably often visited since, for Mr 
Speedy assures me that not more than twenty years ago they 
regularly frequented the policies of Duddingston House. In 
vol. xx., p. 49, we are told they abounded at Loch Mahaich, 
near Doune. Patrick Neill, in his list of Habbie’s Howe 
animals (1808), enters the Otter with the remark, “seldom 
met with” against it; and we find the fact of one being killed 
during severe weather in December 1812 at the farm-offices 
of Ingliston, a mile and a half from the Almond, considered 
worth recording in the Scots Magazine for that year (p. 892). 
A male killed near Stow in the end of 1831, and a female in 
November 1832, are recorded in the “ New Statistical Account” 
of the parish (p. 404). Both were sent to the museum of the 
University of Edinburgh. The animal is also mentioned in 
Stark’s “ Picture of Edinburgh” (1834) as inhabiting the 
Water of Leith, “ but is rare.” On the whole, I am inclined 
to think that its status in the district now is not much worse 
than it was three-quarters of a century ago. 
MacGillivray, in his “ British Quadrupeds,”’ 1838, p. 180, 
states that a pack of otter-hounds was then kept by Lord John 
