62 Tlic II VIC of the Wolvc}-cnc and Beaver. 



work that can be done with those ugly tails, and 

 the timber that can be felled by those keen little 

 teeth, the broad Atlantic must be crossed, and the 

 animals seen in their native haunts. 



The American Beaver {Castor Fiber) has long 

 been regarded with admiration and wonder from 

 the reports brought in by trappers and others of 

 its remarkable instinct and sagacity. Audubon, 

 the great American naturalist, says, " The early 

 writers on both continents have represented it as a 

 rational, intelligent and moral being, requiring but 

 the faculty of speech to raise it almost to an 

 equality, in some respects, with our own species. 

 There is in the composition of every man, whatever 

 may be his pride in his philosophy, a proneness in 

 a greater or less degree to superstition, or at least 

 credulity. The world is at best but slow to be 

 enlightened, and the trammels thrown around us 

 by the tales of the nursery are not easily shaken off. 

 Such trav^cllers into the northern parts of Sweden, 

 Russia, Norway, and Lapland, a^ Olaus Magnus, 

 Jean Marius, Leems, &c., whose extravagant and 

 imaginary notions were recorded by the credulous 

 Gesner, who wrote marvellous accounts of the 

 habits of the beavers in Northern Europe, seem to 

 have worked upon the imaginations and confused 

 the intellects of the earlv exolorers of our Northern 



