We frequently meet with the brown bear in the Alps, but the black-bear very rarely. But in the forests of the northern countries of Europe and America, the latter is very common. The brown one is both fierce and carnivorous, but the black-bear is only wild, and constantly refuses to eat flesh. Of this we cannot give a more striking testimony than what M. du Pratz relates in his history of Louisiana. "The bear," says he, (speaking of the black one) "appears in Louisiana in winter, because the snows which cover the northern countries prevent him from procuring his usual food, which consists of roots, acorns, and vegetables in general; but milk and honey form his favourite repast, and when he meets with those articles he will sooner die than relinquish them. In defiance of the prevailing notion that the bear is carnivorous, I maintain, with every person of this province, and the circumjacent countries, that he is not so. These animals have never been known to devour men, nor even to eat butcher's meat, notwithstanding their multitude, and the excesses of hunger which they often suffer. While I resided at the Natches, one winter was so severe in the northern regions, that the bears flocked from them in great numbers; so great indeed that they starved each other, and were very meagre. In the night they were frequently seen roaming into houses and farm-yards, which were not properly shut, where they might have feasted upon meat, but they never touched it, nor devoured aught but such grain as they could pick up. If they had possessed a carnivorous disposition, it must have shewn itself upon such a pressing occasion. They never kill animals to devour them; and were they in reality carnivorous, they would not abandon their own snowy regions, where they might find men and animals at discretion, to search for fruit and roots, an aliment which carnivorous tribes reject." M. du Pratz adds in a note, that since writing the above passage, he had learned, with certainty, that in the mountains of Savoy there are bears of two sorts, the one black, like those of Louisiana, not carnivorous, and the other red, which are as much so as wolves.