at a distance from the house, and this perhaps might be the reason why those I reared were less tame than the wolf, with whom this precaution was unnecessary. At the age of five or six months the young foxes began to chace the ducks and fowls, upon which account I was obliged to chain them, and although I kept these very foxes for more than two years, they never attempted to touch a fowl while they were so confined; a live hen was frequently fixed near them for a whole night, and although they had previously been kept short of food, they never forget they were chained, and the hen invariably remained unmolested by them. The fox is so subject to the influence of climate, that the species are almost as numerous as of any domestic animal. The generality of French foxes are red, some few are grey, but all have the tip of their tail white; the latter are sometimes called in Burgundy _coal-foxes_, from having very black feet. In the northern countries there are foxes of all colours; black, blue, dark and light grey, white, white with reddish legs, white with black heads, white with the end of the tails black, red with the throat and belly white, and lastly with a stripe of black along the back and another crossing it at the shoulders; of these the throats are also black and they are larger than the others. The common kind are most generally diffused; they are not only in Europe, but throughout northern and central Asia and in America; but in Africa and the countries near the equator they are very rare. Those who say they have seen them at Calcutta and other southern provinces, must have taken the jackall for the fox. Aristotle falls into a similar error, when he says, the foxes of Egypt were smaller than those of Greece; those little Egyptian foxes being only polecats, whose stench is intolerable. They are evidently the natives of cold climates, both from their not being affected by extreme cold and their living in the countries adjacent to both poles. The hair of the white fox is not much esteemed, because the hairs fall easily off; the silver-grey is better, and the blue and striped are prized on account of their rarity, but the black is the most valuable, and yields to none but the sable. There are foxes in Spitzbergen, Greenland, Lapland, and in Canada; in the latter place there are some of the striped species, the common kind are not so red as those in France, but their hair is longer and more plentiful. SUPPLEMENT. Some travellers assert that the heads and feet of the Greenland foxes resemble those of dogs, and that they bark like them; that they are of various colours, such as white, grey and blue, and that they live upon eggs, birds, flies, bees, and whatever they can procure from the holes of the rocks in the sea. At Kamtschatka there are some of a dark chesnut, others red with black bellies, and others of a dark grey, all of which have thick coats of hair very glossy and beautiful.