230 TJie lloneof tlie Wolveroie ami Beaver. 



devour them gradually and with equal voracit\-, (ill 

 they fall down. 



"More insatiable and rapacious than the wolf, if 

 endowed with equal agility, the glutton would 

 destroy all the other animals ; but he moves so 

 heavily that the only animal he is able to overtake 

 in the course is the beaver, whose cabins he some- 

 times attacks, and devours the whole unless they 

 quickly take to the water, for the beaver outstrips 

 him in swimming. When he perceives that his 

 prey has escaped he seizes the fishes ; and when he 

 can find no living creature to destroy he goes in 

 quest of the dead, whom he digs up from their 

 graves, and devours with avidity." Bufifon also 

 terms the w^olverene the "quadruped vulture," and 

 repeats the old story that it entices reindeer to 

 come beneath the tree within whose branches it lies 

 concealed, by throwing down the moss which that 

 animal is fond of; but all these stories are fictitious, 

 and in a later edition of his work he corrects the 

 errors of previous writers, and sweeps away most 

 of the marvellous propensities attributed to the 

 glutton, being the better enabled to do this from 

 his personal observation, a friend having sent him 

 a v/olverene as a present, whose habits he carefully 

 noted for eighteen months. In a supplementary 

 chapter he informs us, " He was so tame that he 



