Canada -- Description and travel; Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); Indians of North America -- Canada
"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 Elau, 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 10-1/2 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
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