420 LETTERS. 
not believed unnatural here ; and as I was once 
fpeaking to a judicious Greek Priefl: about this af- 
fair, and told him that the learned in Europe were 
of different opinions, whether St. John in the de- 
fart, eat a kind of bird, or a plant, afking him 
which of thefe opinions he thought the true one ? 
He anfwered with a laugh, that both were alike 
erroneous. Their church had never taken this 
food to be any other, than what isexpreffed in the 
Teftament, nor did he know any thing to contra- 
dict it. 
I have the honour to fend here inclofed the fly 
called Panorpa Coa, which I took on the ifland Me- 
teline in the Archipelago ; I have never feen this 
fpecies in Sweden, and know not whether it is 
Swedifh, if it is, it was unneceffary to fend it fo far. 
Likewise the meafure (28 feet,) containing the 
thicknefs of the Plane-tree, which is a prodigy in 
our father’s kingdom, I mean Stanchio, the town 
in which Hippocrates was born. This tree has 
forty-feven branches, each a fathom thick, fup- 
ported by ftone pillars, and covers a very large 
terrace, fhades feveral houfes of various fizes, being 
above twenty in number ; I imagine, in feeing it, to 
have beheld thelargeft, oldeft, and mod remarkable 
inhabitant of the vegetable kingdom. All theob- 
fervations and collections I made inNatolia, I have 
left in Smyrna, in the houfe of Conful Rydelius. 
I fliall have the honour to fend you copies of a 
great number of them, which I have taken with 
me in notes, as faff as I can write them. I am 
alone, and if I had only one to aflift me in writ- 
ing, I fhould do twice as much ; but bow foal’ 
we get bread in the wilderness ? 
A certain affair has happened to me, of which 
this opportunity will not permit me to fpeak* 
which 
