DWELLINGS OF MUSKRAT AND BEAVER—GILPIN. 279 
widely from the muskrat. A far more powerful frame, armed by 
powerful teeth, more terrestrial in its habits, and constructing lar- 
ger and more durable houses, and of stronger materials. He 
constructs on running streams, which he has already dammed 
across. thus giving to his work a perpetual head of water. It is 
apart from this paper to describe these dams, accounts of which 
have come down to us clothed with magnificent exaggeration. 
Yet no one can stand over and inspect the workman of 
them as they appear on the small streams of our Province, 
where the labor is little and the natural obstacles of water flow 
few, but to confess that the simplest truth is above all exaggera- 
tion, and the design of instinct labor, or the appearance of it at 
least, equal, if not beyond, that adaptation of labor and material 
to different obstacles to be overcome, that is supposed belong to 
pure thought. The adaptation of beaver work to broad running 
streams, narrow streamlets and sluggish water courses, to rocky 
bottoms, or mud-timbered banks, even still remaining in N. 
Scotia, is worthy of a paper by itself. Sweeping softly in your 
canoe over a slight expanse of the many head waters of the 
Sissiboo river, slowly falling towards the Bay of Fundy, you find 
the stream tied by a beaver dam some half mile ahead of you, 
and almost immediately you pass a grey granite rock sloping in- 
to the stream. There upon the down stream slope you find a very 
flattened cone like an inverted saucer of white and peeled sticks 
in endless confusion, thatching its shallow convex roof. One 
side, the upper rests upon the grey rock, the other descends be- 
neath the water. This one had two processes, slightly elevated 
but still thatched, dividing, as it were, the mass entering the 
water so as to make two ridges running into the stream. The 
whole was built on the down stream slope of the rock to prevent 
it being carried away by the ice. Were it not for the milk- 
white and peeled sticks standing everywhere outwards, it looked 
like a cart of rubbish shot down a slope. A sweep of the paddle 
and the canoe grated upon the sticks, and we saw grasses, 
clay and moss betwixt their interstices. In another dome 
which we opened from the top by our axes and hands, we cut 
through two feet of layers of clay, dried hay, a few stones and 
mosses; we then came to a narrow, sloping shelf edge, around a 
