burrowing under their skins deposit their eggs, so that sometimes by the end of winter the worms that proceed from them render their skins as full of holes as a sieve. The herds of rein-deer require a great deal of care; they are subject to elope, and voluntarily strive to regain their natural liberty: they must be closely attended, and narrowly watched, and never led to pasture but in open places; and in case the herd is numerous they have need of many persons to keep them together, and to run after those which attempt to stray. They are all marked, that they may be known again, for it often happens that they stray in the woods, or mix with other herds. In short, the Laplanders are continually occupied in the care of their rein-deer, which constitute all their wealth, and they know well how to procure every convenience, or, more properly, all the necessities of life, from these animals. In the winter season they cloath themselves from head to foot with the furs of the rein-deer, which are impenetrable to frost or rain; and in summer they make use of the hides from which the fur has fallen off. They also spin the hair, and cover the sinews which they take from the body of the dead animal, for cordage and thread. They eat the flesh, drink the milk, and of the latter they also make very rich cheese. This milk, when churned, gives, instead of butter, a kind of suet. This particularly, as well as the largeness of the horns, and the plenty of fat he affords at the beginning of the rutting season, are so many proofs of the superabundance of nourishment; and what still more strongly proves his superabundance to be excessive, or at least greater than any other species, is that the rein-deer is the only animal where the female has horns as well as the male, and this last is the only one also who sheds his horns and renews them even when castrated. For in stags, fallow-deer, and roe-bucks, who have undergone this operation, the horns of the animal remain always in the same state they were at the moment of castration. Thus the rein-deer is, of all animals, that in which the superfluity of nutritive matter is the most apparent, and this, perhaps, is less owing to the nature of the animal than to the quality of its food, for the white moss, which is his only aliment during the winter, is a _lichen_, whose substance resembles that of the mushroom; it is very nourishing, and is more loaded with organic molecules, than the leaves or buds of trees, and it is for this reason that the rein-deer has larger horns, and affords more fat than the stag; and that the females, and those that are castrated, are not deprived of horns: it is the cause also of the great variety that is found in the size of the horns, and of the figure and number of the branches, beyond what is possessed by any other of the deer kind. The males who had been neither hunted nor confined, and who feed amply, and at pleasure, on this substantial aliment, have prodigious large horns,