26 THE BEAVER 
success.” He also cites the fact that beavers will turn 
other streams into their own in order to add to the water 
supply as something requiring thought. 
G. J. Romanes expressed the following opinion: “Most 
remarkable among rodents for instinct and intelligence, 
unquestionably stands the beaver. Indeed, there is no 
animal—not even excepting the ants and bees—whose 
instinct has risen to a higher level of far-reaching adapta- 
tion to certain conditions of environment, or where facul- 
ties, undoubtedly instinctive, are more puzzlingly wrought 
up with faculties no less undoubtedly intelligent.” 
On the other side Johnson considers the beaver acts 
entirely from instinct. ‘‘But in the course of the ages it 
has evolved a set of instincts, highly complex, at which we 
can not but marvel just as we marvel at the instincts of the 
ant and the bee. ‘These instincts are inherited and at just 
the right time in their life history, when the proper stimuli 
prompt them, the young beaver will do certain things, and 
do them in the same way and just as well as their parents, 
without first having to be shown or taught how.” 
Seton says: ‘While of a low general mentality, the beaver 
has a wonderfully developed instinct for the building of 
dams and waterways. A quickness to take advantage of 
little things and a ready adaptability to change of sur- 
roundings that in this special department puts it in the 
highest class of low animal intelligence. A case parallel 
with that of the ants indeed; which, though so low in or- 
ganization, have acquired extraordinarily complex instincts, 
whose history affords one of the most wonderful ‘fairy tales 
of science.’ ”’ 
I think Seton puts the case very well when he says that 
after the beaver had been considered on a par with man 
intellectually and most wonderful tales were told about it, 
there was a reaction, and it was put in the same class as the 
