On the Fur Trade, and Fur-bearing Animals. 311 
Art. VII.—On the Fur Trade, and Fur-bearing Animals. 
‘| : TO PROFESSOR SILLIMAN, 
Sir,—Deeming the fur trade one of our national interests, and 
presuming that many of its valuable details are unknown to most 
of your readers, I send the following sketches relating to the trade, 
and to fur-bearing animals; which, if they can be admitted into yonr 
Journal, may be found both interesting and useful.* 
The skins of animals were employed for clothing from the earliest 
periods; ‘coats of skins” having been given to our first parents, ever 
before their expulsion from Eden. As the human race grew numer- 
ous, the supply was deficient; and when the southern latitudes be- 
came inhabited and men formed societies, and lived in fixed habita- 
tions, civilization developed ingenuity and taste, devising various fab-. 
rics of wool, linen and silk. ‘These were of every variety of form and 
pattern, rivalling the rainbow in hues, and crnamented with resem- 
blances of every object of beauty. They were also light and cool, 
adapted to the sunny skies of southern and middle Asia. The val- 
lies of the Euphrates and Tigris, and of the Nile, as well as Syria 
and Mesopotamia, were early occupied by highly civilized nations, 
enjoying the luxuries of manufactures and arts. It was principally 
the natives of northern and mountainous regions, and their imme- 
diate borders, who were habitually clad in furs, and skins; except 
those horsemen shepherds, who, wrapped in furs, Gemseiot the im- 
mense steppe on the north of the Aral, Caspian, and Euxine seas, 
including the intervening range of the Caucasus, and extending west 
to the mouth of the Danube. ‘These barbarians, under “ the name 
of Scythians,” occasionally forced the mountain passes and ravaged 
the plains of Mesopotamia and Syria, Their hostile incursions open- 
ed the way to a commercial intercourse, and in the progress of time 
the manufactures of Babylonia and Persia were exchanged for the 
horses, cattle and furs, brought by these savages from the forests on 
the north of “ the treeless plains” of Scythia. 
* Tam indebted to Mr. Aikin’s paper on fur and the fur trade, published in 
Commerce, 1830, London; and to several intelligent merchants of New York, for 
much of the information euitidnied | in the following article. 
