Biographical Memoir of Baron de Beauvois. 19 



death. With the whites, they do not even look to genealogy ; 

 and all are in their eyes of the same family. 



M. de Beauvois arrived in one of their little towns at the mo- 

 ment when one of them had been killed by a colonist ; and he 

 would have paid the forfeit of his life for all the men of his 

 colour, had not his interpreter succeeded in making them un- 

 derstand, that having come from France, he did not belong to 

 the family of the United States. They then treated him with 

 friendship ; but their friendship had nearly done him as much 

 harm as their hostility had threatened to do. In an attack of 

 fever, they wished him to take the remedies which they them- 

 selves used in such cases ; and their effect was so violent, that 

 he almost became a victim to his docility. 



Some French families, which had originally come from Loui- 

 siana, are, as it were, lost in these countries at a distance from 

 the coasts. M. de Beauvois discovered Protestants there, who 

 had left France at the period of the revocation of the edict of 

 Nantes, and who had almost adopted the riianners of the natives. 

 He conceived it would be easy to establish an intercourse with 

 them which might have put us in possession of their fur trade. 



Having come into America a true zoologist, he did not con- 

 tent himself with observing the fur animals. The rattlesnakes, 

 those reptiles to which the most extraordinary properties had 

 been attributed, independently of their formidable poison, were 

 to him a peculiarly interesting object of inquiry. He was vnU 

 ness to the fact, that the female serpents, at the moment of dan- 

 ger, afford an asylum to their young in their mouths. 



His collections of all kinds were very rich ; he did not even 

 neglect to collect fossil bones ; and it is to him that we are in- 

 debted for the knowledge of the teeth of the megatherium of 

 Mr Jefferson, a knowledge which completed that of the extinct 

 animal. 



But as if an inexorable fatality pursued him, his whole trea- 

 sures which were embarked in a vessel carrying English prisoners 

 to Halifax, and which ran aground near the harbour, were either 

 plundered or swallowed by the waves. 



It was in the midst of the vexation occasioned by this last 

 loss, that he at length learned that the government of his coun- 

 try was appeased with respect to him ; and that France was 

 again open to him. The Institute, which had just been formed, 



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