324 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



part of their tail, and otherwise injuring them. These paresseux are 

 more easily caught in traps than the others, and the trapper rarely 

 misses one of them. They only dig a hole from the water running 

 obliquely towards the surface of the ground twenty-five or thirty 

 feet, from which they emerge, when hungry, to obtain food, returning 

 to the same hole with the wood they procure to eat the bark. They 

 never form dams, and are sometimes to the number of five or seven 

 together; all are males. It is not at all improbable, that these unfor- 

 tunate fellows have, as is the case with the males of many species 

 of animals, been engaged in fighting with others of their sex, and, after 

 having been conquered and driven away from the lodge, have become 

 idlers from a kind of necessity. The working beavers, on the con- 

 trary, associate, males, females, and young, together. Audubon and 

 Bachmari's Quadrupeds of North America. 



THE AMERICAN BISON IN FRANCE. 



M. LAMARE PIQUOT, who has travelled extensively in our Western 

 country, has addressed a memoir to the Paris Academy of Sciences on 

 the naturalization and domestication, in France, of the American bison. 

 He urges that the animal is remarkably strong and swift ; that it 

 would be fit for draught in the operations of husbandry and domestic 

 business ; and that it would contribute a new meat of agreeable flavor. 

 He considers the animal as the finest and the most useful of the 

 native productions of the Great West. He relates, that he saw it 

 hunted on the banks of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and that, 

 from the facility of destroying it, he fears the species will soon disap- 

 pear. The French laborers, in town and country, have scarcely any 

 other food than bread and vegetables, on account of the high price of 

 meat ; therefore it is highly important to multiply the meats. The 

 bison, he adds, has been domesticated on the Red River, and the flesh 

 found exceHent after it has been five years in that state. In proof of 

 their powers of endurance, he cites an instance, in which an animal at 

 four years of age performed a journey of seventy-five miles in a day ; 

 and on the morrow, dragged back, by eleven at night, a load of eight 

 hundred pounds. 



SEXES IN THE OYSTER. 



M. QUATREFAGES, in a communication to the French Academy, 

 states, that long investigation has induced him to believe that the 

 common opinion that the sexes are united in the oyster is erroneous. 

 These observations have been confirmed by those of M. Blanchard. 

 Both of these gentlemen advocate the artificial propagation of the 

 oyster. 



ON THE ZOOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF YOUNG MAMMALIA. 



AT the meeting of the American Association, Prof. Agassiz re- 

 marked, that zoologists have, in their investigations, constantly neg- 



