Bennett's article on the beaver. 325 



by an overseer, who gives notice to his workmen when to be at 

 their posts by flapping with his tail upon the water, divides them 

 into parties for each several kinds of Avork, distributes their em- 

 ployments, assigns their stations, and superintends the execution 

 of his commands, is too absurd to require refutation. But there 

 are many other statements regarding them equally untrue, 

 although not at first sight so palpably ridiculous. Thus it is said 

 that their tails are used by them as sledges for the conveyance of 

 their materials, a purpose for which the conformation of this ap 

 pendage renders it highly improbable that it can serve, and which 

 observation has proved to be performed in a very different man- 

 ner. But not content with metamorphosing this organ into a 

 sledge, our travellers have also made it a trowel, and have given 

 very particular descriptions of the manner in which the beaver 

 employs it in spreading the plaster, with which, according to 

 their accounts, his work is overlaid. Unfortunately, however, it 

 is equally unfitted by its structure for such an operation ; and the 

 only organs employed in mixing up the mud with the rest of the 

 materials, are the fore paws and the mouth. These, in fact, are 

 the instruments with which all the labors of the beavers are 

 effected; and it is sufficiently obvious that neither with their 

 assistance, nor indeed with the united powers of all their organs, 

 could these animals drive stakes of the thickness of a man's les" 

 three or four feet deep into the ground, or execute a variety oi 

 other feats for which they have obtained general credit. 



The sticks and branches which they use, instead of being 

 driven into the ground, are laid for the most part in a horizontal 

 direction, and they are only prevented from floating away by the 

 stones and mud which are brought up by the beavers in their 

 paws from the bottom to be laid upon them, and which gradually 

 become cemented into a firm and compact mass. All their work 

 is performed during the night. Although the favorable nature or 

 the situation may have induced many families to assemble in the 

 same spot, they do not on that account carry on their operations 

 in common ; unless when a dam of large extent is to be built, 

 when they usually unite their forces for its completion. Each 

 family occupies itself exclusively on its own habitation, which 

 has in general but one apartment. The idea of their houses 

 being divided into several chambers, each allotted to its appro- 

 priate purpose, may have originated from the fact of their some- 



