tivator, and furnishes shipping with the most useful and important part of its equipment. The several processes of hemp, also, benefit the state, by employing many hands that could not be so usefully and profitably engaged in other occupations. The advantage, therefore, which a country must derive from the culture and manufacture of hemp, throughout its several branches, can not be doubted, and is sufficiently proved by the importance which Russia has derived from her commerce in that article, by which she has, in a manner, rendered the greatest navy in the world dependent upon her will and caprice. The importation of hemp from Russia has annually amounted to no less than 30,000 tons for the general consumption of the country, and for the use of the royal navy. It must, therefore, in every point of view, be a great object to Great Britain to draw her supplies of hemp from her own colonies. The efforts of government to promote its general cultivation have hitherto proved very partially successful. The failure is attributed, in a great degree, to the attachment of the Canadians to old customs, and the opposition of the Romish clergy, hemp not being a tithable article. The wheat merchants and the seigniors, who depend for success in trade and for the constant employment of their mills, the chief source of their revenues, upon abundant crops of wheat, are strongly opposed to the introduction of the culture of hemp, which they conceive would partly, if not wholly, annihilate that of wheat."-Lambert, vol. i., p. 449.

M. de Talon, the able Intendant of Quebec (in 1665), strongly recommended the cultivation of hemp, having ascertained that the nature of the soil and climate promised every possible success.

No. XXXII.

"It is calculated that there is a greater proportion of wheat soil in the Canadas than in England, and that, if this valuable grain were cultivated in this latter country in the same defective manner as in these provinces, it could not be of much value. Climate, an equally important particular, seems, at first sight, less favorable than soil. A region which for several months, and, in some districts, for more than half the year, remains buried in frost and snow, may well be supposed unfriendly to vegetation. The strong, steady heat of summer, however, counteracts almost completely this chilling influence, and matures, with surprising rapidity, the most valuable plants. Mr. Evans has had wheat in ear nine weeks after it was sown. Even the violent alternations of frost and thaw, of show and rain, instead of injuring vegetation, are found to pulverize and soften the soil, and thus render it more fertile with less culture. The great steadiness of the summer weather exempts plants from sundry vicissitudes which they undergo in a more changeable climate. From these causes, the annuals suited to a temperate region grow in Canada to full perfection, and as these include the grains fitted for bread, the food most essential to man, she has little cause to envy any other country. In regard to wheat, indeed, the

chief of those vegetables, this observation must be somewhat restricted. Its plants are so far biennial, that to acquire the very first quality they must be sown during the preceding autumn. Yet this course has not been found safe in Lower Canada, where wheat must be treated as an annual, sown in spring, and reaped before the end of the year. The defect is owing, not to the rigor of the winter, still less to the depth of snow, which, on the contrary, is found to protect and cherish vegetable growth, but is ascribed to severe frosts, violent and chilling rains, occurring after the snow has left the ground, and the plants have made some progress. An opinion is entertained that, with good management, autumn wheat might be raised with success. The British American Land Company have decidedly adopted this idea, and some successful experiments have been made. Mr. Evans, however, is of opinion that, from the above causes, unless in some favored situations, it must always be an unsafe crop, and peculiarly liable to disease. He had once autumn and spring wheats growing on the same field, when, although the first was completely ruined by rust and mildew, the other proved excellent. He seems to apprehend, therefore, that Lower Canada must be content with her good spring growth. It is said, however, to require a soil more minutely pulverized, while the grain produced contains a greater proportion of gluten, and is thus harder and more difficult to grind. In Upper Canada, autumn wheat is raised without any difficulty."-H. Murray, vol. i., p. 339.

"Canada wheat is of an excellent quality: it is thought superior to the Baltic wheat, being harder, and yielding more flour in proportion to the quality. The Canadian farmers are very negligent in preventing the growth of weeds, so that the wheat, when thrashed, is very foul, and seldom or never in a condition to be shipped until it is cleaned. For that purpose, it undergoes the operation of being once or twice put through what is called the cribbles."—Gray's Canada, p. 199.

No. XXXIII.

It is still a subject of dispute among naturalists whether the moose deer and the elk are the same animal. Professor Kalm and his translator, Forster, formed this opinion principally on the Algonquin name for the elk, Musu, the final u being scarcely sounded. The Algonquins, before the Iroquois attained to such great power in America, were the principal nation in the northern part of the continent, and their language a kind of universal language. Charlevoix says, "Ce qu'on appelle ici Orignal, c'est ce qu'en Allemagne, en Pologne, et en Muscovie on nomme Elan, ou la Grand Bête." The first mention of this remarkable animal is in a tract of Mr. Josselyn's, entitled "New England Rarities." That author says, "It is a very fine creature, growing to twelve feet high; the horns are extremely beautiful, with broad palms, some of them full grown, being two fathoms from the tip of one horn to the tip of the other." The same author, in another work, entitled

"Two Voyages to New England," calls this creature “ a monster of superfluity;" and says that, "when full grown, it is many times larger than an ox. The best account, however, of the moose deer is Mr. Paul Dudley's. This gentleman says they are of two kinds : the common light-gray moose deer, called by the Indians Wampoose, and the larger black moose. The gray moose is the same animal which Mr. Clayton, in his account of the Virginian quadrupeds, calls the elk; and this is the creature described in the Anatomical Discoveries of the Paris Academy under the name of the stag of Canada. Horns of this creature have been sent from Virginia, and called elks' horns; they are wholly the same with those of our red deer, except in size, weighing about twelve pounds, and measuring from the burr to the tip about six feet long.-Phil. Trans., No. cxliv., p. 386; Abr., vol. vii., p. 447. Mr. Dudley says that the gray moose is like the English deer, and that these creatures herd together thirty or more in a company. The black or large moose has been taken, he says, measuring 14 spans in height from the withers, which, allowing 9 inches to the span, is 10 feet. The large horns found fossil in Ireland have, from their vast dimensions, been supposed to have originally belonged to the black moose deer; they are provided with brow antlers between the burr and the palm, which the European elk has not, and the American has. However, the largest horns of the American moose ever brought over are only 32 inches long, and 34 between tip and tip, while some of the Irish horns are near 12 feet between tip and tip, and 6 feet 4 inches long; they may probably be ranked among those remains which fossilists distinguish by the title of diluvian.

Professor Kalm says, "They sometimes dig very large horns out of the ground in Ireland, and nobody in that country, or any where else in the world, knows any animal that has such horns. This has induced many to believe that it is the moose deer so famous in North America, and that the horns found were of animals of this kind which had formerly lived in that island, but were gradually destroyed. It has even been concluded that Ireland, in distant ages, either was connected with North America, or that a number of little islands, which are lost at present, made a chain between them. This led me to inquire whether an animal with such excessive great horns as are ascribed to the moose deer had ever been seen in any part of this country. Mr. Bertram told me that he had carefully inquired to that purpose, and was entirely of opinion that there was no such animal in North America. Mr. Franklin related that he had, when a boy, seen two of the animals which they call moose deer; but he well remembered that they were not near of such a size as they must have been if the horns found in Ireland were to fit them. The two animals which he saw were brought to Boston in order to be sent to England to Queen Anne. The height of the animal up to the back was that of a pretty tall horse, but the head and its horns were still higher. On my travels in Canada, I often inquired of the Frenchmen whether there had ever been seen so large an animal in this country as some people say there is in North America, and with

such great horns as are sometimes dug out in Ireland. But I was always told that they had never heard of it, much less seen it; some added that if there was such an animal, they certainly must have met with it in some of their excursions in the woods."-Kalm, in Pink., vol. xiii., p. 472. In shape the elk or moose deer is much less elegant than the rest of the deer kind, having a very short and thick neck; a large head; horns dilating immediately from the base into a broad, palmated form; a thick, broad upper lip, hanging very much over the lower; very high shoulders, and long legs. The hair is a dark grayish-brown color, strong, coarse, and elastic, much longer on the top of the shoulders and ridge of the neck than on other parts, forming together a kind of stiffish mane; the eye and ears are large, the hoofs broad, and the tail extremely short. The elk resides principally in the midst of forests, for the convenience of browsing the boughs of trees, because it is prevented from grazing with facility on account of the shortness of the neck and the disproportionate length of the legs. Their gait is remarkable; their general pace is described to be a high, shambling, but very swift trot, the feet being lifted up very high, and the hoofs clattering much during their motion; in their common walk they lift their feet very high, and will without difficulty step over a gate five feet high. The flesh of the moose is extremely sweet and nourishing; the Indians say that they can travel three times further after a meal of moose than after any other animal food. The tongues are excellent; but the nose is said to be perfect marrow, and is considered the greatest delicacy in Canada. The skin makes excellent buff, being strong, soft, and light. The Indians dress the hide, and, after soaking it for some time, stretch and render it supple by a lather of the brains in hot water. They not only make their snow-shoes of the skin, but after the chase cover the hull of their canoes with it, in which they return home with the spoils of their chase. The hair on the neck, withers, and hams of a full-grown elk is of considerable use in making mattresses and saddles; and the palmated parts of the horns are further excavated by the Indians, and converted into ladles and other culinary articles. An ancient superstition has prevailed that the elk is naturally subject to epilepsy, and that it find its cure by scratching its ear with the hoof until it draws blood; in consequence of this notion, the hoofs of the elk form an article of the ancient Materia Medica. A piece of the hoof was anciently set in a ring, and worn as a preservative against the complaint above mentioned; sometimes the hoof was held in the patient's hand, or applied to the pulse, to the left ear, or suspended from the neck.-Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Cervus Alces; Lambert's Canada, vol. i., p. 414.

Charlevoix speaks of the species having been almost entirely destroyed even in his time (1721) by the indiscriminate carnage of the early settlers.-Vol. v., p. 184. "Les Orignaux étoient partout à foison, lorsque nous découvrimes a pays, et ils pouvoient faire un objet pour le commerce, une douceur pour la vie, si on les avoit mieux menagés."-Vol. v., p. 193.

La Hontan minutely describes the chase of the elk or moose deer,

in which laborious amusement he spent three months. Fifty-six elks were killed by the party of savages who accompanied him. He says that the flesh of the Orignal eats deliciously. He was assured by the savages that in summer it would trot for three days and three nights without intermission; it neither runs nor skips, he says, but its trot will almost keep up with the running of a hart.-La Hontan, in Pinkerton, vol. xiii., p. 284.

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No. XXXIV.

Ursus Americanus, a species distinct from the black bear of Europe: it has a long, pointed nose, and narrow forehead, the hair of a glossy black color, smoother and shorter than that of the European kind, and is generally smaller than the European bear. The brown bear, Ursus Arctos, is also found in some of the northern parts of America. La Hontan observed the difference of disposition between the brown and the black bear; the latter, he says, are extremely black, but not mischievous, for they never attack one unless they be wounded or fired upon." The reddish (rougeâtres) bears are mischievous creatures, for they fall fiercely upon the huntsmen, whereas the black fly from them. The former sort are less, and more nimble than the latter. The flesh of the black bear, and, above all, their feet, are very nice victuals. The savages affirm that no flesh is so delicious as that of bears, and I think they are right.*— La Hontan, in Pinkerton, vol. xiii., p. 288. Charlevoix, vol. v., p. 172.

The Ursus Maritimus, or Polar Bear, is confined to the coldest parts of the globe, being unknown except on the coasts of Hudson's Bay, Greenland, and Spitzbergen. (Lambert says that they have been seen at Newfoundland, and La Hontan saw one at a distance at Placentia.) This animal grows to so great a size that the skin of some are thirteen feet long. They are so fond of human flesh that they will greedily disinter dead bodies; they will attack companies of armed men, and will even board small vessels. The skins of the Polar Bear were formerly offered by the hunters of the Arctic regions to the high altars of cathedral and other churches, for the priest to stand on during the celebration of mass in winter.-Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Ursus.

Captain Clarke agrees with La Hontan in ascribing fierceness of disposition to the brown bear, and also speaks of it as "reddish,” or of a bay brown. "We had rather," says Captain Clarke, encounter two Indians than meet a single brown bear; their very track in the mud or sand, which we have sometimes found 11 inches long and 71 wide, exclusive of the talons, is alarming. The wonderful power of life which they possess renders them dreadful: there is no chance of killing them by a single shot, unless the ball goes through the brain.” Six of Captain Clarke's party, all good hunters, having sight

* Bear's flesh is reckoned one of the greatest rarities among the Chinese, insomuch that, as Du Halde informs us, the emperor will send fifty or a hundred leagues into Tartary to procure it for a great entertainment.