Otter
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Otter. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in zoology, the genus Lutra Illinois and Fox rivers, on the Illinois and Michigan canal, and on the Burlingand especially L. vulgaris, the common ton Route, the Chicago, Rock Island, and otter. The animals vary greatly in size; Pacific and the Chicago, Ottawa and but the total length averages about 40 Peoria railroads; 85 miles S. W. of inches, of which the tail constitutes Chicago. Here are Pleasant View Colrather more than a third. The fur is lege (Luth.), St. Francis Xavier Acadof a soft, brown color, lighter on throat emy, Ryburn Memorial Hospital, busiand breast, and consists of long, coarse, ness college, parks, Reddick Library, shining hairs, with a short under fur of court house, street railroad and electric fine texture. The otter lives exclusively on fish, and is therefore rarely met with far from water. The female produces from three to five at a birth, usually in March or April, and brings them up in a nest formed of grass, and usually in a hollow in a river bank or in the shelter of the roots of some overhanging tree. OTTER In angling, an instrument for fishing, so called from its destructive nature. It is a float, from which lines run out with bait or flies, and which is either moored or trailed parallel to a boat. Called also a trot line. In entomology, the larva of the ghost moth.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a large animal of the weasel tribe. The American otter is about forty-five inches in total length, one-third of which may be allowed for the tail. The head is large and flat. The body is comparatively slender and capable of following anywhere that the head can pass. The otter is an aquatic animal nesting in burrows like those of the beaver or muskrat. It lives chiefly on fish, which its palmated feet and muscular body enable it to pursue with inconceivable swiftness. The otter is a very shy animal, yet not infrequently it establishes itself in a suitable pond near a town or farmhouse, and succeeds in concealing its presence for many years. In the wild, it is fond of sliding down a bank plump into the water, climbing up, and sliding down again, with all the zest of a schoolboy. Its fur is exceedingly valuable. The otter of Great Britain appears to be a somewhat different animal. It likewise inhabits the banks of rivers and feeds on fish. Otter hunting with dogs is a favorite sport in England. The fur of a South American otter, called nutria, is well known in the London and Leipsic markets. See Fur
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's called otter hunting with dogs "a favorite sport in England" in 1910; that sport was outlawed there in 1978, after the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) had already collapsed across most of England in the 1950s and 60s, a crash later blamed on dieldrin and other organochlorine pesticides washing off farmland. Legal protection and cleaner rivers reversed it: by 2011 surveys were recording otters again in every English county, and the North American river otter, reclassified from Lutra to Lontra canadensis, has been reintroduced to states where trapping had wiped it out. Both accounts say the animal lives "exclusively on fish"; modern diet studies add crayfish, frogs, waterbirds and small mammals, and the famous bank-sliding is now read as travel and play rather than pure schoolboy zest. Aiton's "South American otter, called nutria" is a slip that has since been tidied up in every textbook: nutria is the coypu, a rodent, not an otter at all.
Written for this edition, 2026.