desire for liberty which led the beaver to gnaw
everything which came in his way. The door-
posts of his prison suffered from his incisors.
The cask in which he was brought from Canada
had to be double-lined with tin. Once, he
escaped. He had enjoyed the natural and genial
luxury of a bath. Nine months old before he
was put into it, this young beaver was at first
afraid of water, but soon liked it; and when he
was missed he came towards the torches of
the men sent to search for him, swimming
through the water in the vaults of the Garden
of Plants.

The Indian and French Canadian trappers
who supplied Buffon's correspondents and
informants with the materials for his romance of
the beaver were credulous men living still in
the ages of faith. Indeed, our knowledge of the
beaver is still but transitive towards the ages of
science. There is a real obstacle in the way of
a correct knowledge of his habits, for besides
being timid and wary and out-of-the-way,
he works by night. Tame beavers never seem
to have been kept in conditions natural enough
to them, solitary, sequestered, and secluded,
for the exhibition of their instincts and
intelligence. If caught very young the Indian
women nurse them until they are from three
to six weeks old, when they wean themselves
and eat bark and twigs. The cry of a beaver a
few days old, is deceivingly like the cry of an
infant. A trapper in the Rocky Mountains
heard a cry which he felt sure was the wail
of a child. Fearing the presence of an Indian
camp, he crept cautiously through the cotton
wood towards the bank of the river, where
he saw two young beavers on a low bank of
earth near the water, crying for their mother;
and this absent mother he found in one of his
traps.

Mr. L. H. Morgan, to whose work on the
American beaver we are indebted for most of
the novel information which may be found in
this essay, was once at an Indian lodge near the
mouth of the Yellowstone River. He saw there,
a young beaver lapping milk out of a saucer
while an Indian child was pulling its fur. It
was only after hearing it several times, that he
observed the crying to come from the beaver
and not from the baby. Although active and
mischievous, young beavers are harmless,
affectionate, and easily domesticated. A Missouri
trapper told Mr. L. H. Morgan that an Indian
woman, the wife of his partner, having nursed
a beaver, when it grew up it followed them in
all their trapping rounds for several years.
They often shifted their camp and went long
distances; and when they began breaking up
their camp, the beaver understood what they were
doing, and showed by unmistakable signs his
desire to accompany them. Wherever they
stopped, he fed himself upon bark; but he would
eat their food as well, and especially their
sugar. If he saw sugar, he was troublesome
until he got some of it. The half-blood boy
with whom he was nursed and brought up,
was his greatest friend, and he would follow him,
anywhere and everywhere. This beaver was the
pet of the trappers' camp. When they were about
to travel, two packs were fastened upon a horse
and he was mounted between them, riding in
this way many miles and many times.

But no beaver story surpasses one which
appeared in this journal, Number 278, August
20, 1864. This beaver was caught young in a
box trap baited with an apple. He was the
only survivor of a community. His favourite
food was bread and milk sweetened. Brownie
would, it is said, follow his master by day along
brooks and rivers; and even swim after the
steamboat in which his master was a passenger
in Lake Champlain, Canada— a lake a hundred
miles long, and six miles broad—always knowing
where to land, and sleeping on his master's
valise or at his feet in bed in the hotels. Of
course, he felt sure of a treat of sweetened bread
and milk, or of apples, to reward his toil.
Swimming being easier than walking to beavers,
they are more likely to follow those they are
fond of, by water, than on land.

Tales of travellers go so far as to say that
tame beavers have been trained to catch fish.
M. Kalm says he has seen beavers in America
accompanying their masters in boats, jump into
the water, and in a moment after return with a
fish. M. Gmelin says he saw a tame male
beaver in a Siberian village who brought home
female beavers to live with him in domesticity.
Although these statements have been long
before the world, they still await confirmation.
Travellers who have extraordinary things to
tell, cannot be reminded too often of the
necessity of backing them with extraordinary
proofs.

Fossils both of American and of European
beavers have been found. The American and
European beavers seem to be varieties of the
same species; but systematic zoologists differ
respecting the large fossil Trogontherium
(gnawing beast). The remains were first found
on the borders of the sea of Azof, and
afterwards in England. The Trogontherium was
about one-fifth larger than the European beaver.
Casteroïdes (beaver-like) is the name given to a
gigantic fossil beaver, first found in lake
formations in Wayne county, New York. He must
have been five or six times larger than the
beaver of the present day, and the largest of all
extinct or existing rodents.

The anatomical peculiarities of the rodents,
and of the beaver group of them, must be
mastered by every one who wishes to understand
these animals. And when studied in connexion
with their uses, and the habits of the animals,
these dry bones live. Bones are the only parts
of the beavers any one is likely to discover in
the British islands; for the latest records of
living beavers seem to prove that they were
exterminated in Scotland and Wales in the twelfth
century. Once found everywhere in Europe
and Asia Minor, from Siberia to the Euphrates,
beavers are now found only in Siberia; a few
were, indeed, discovered, forty years ago, on
one of the affluents of the Elbe; and some