i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lowed for more than twelve hundred yards ere it becomes indistinct ; 

 and doubtless it was originally much longer, as its eastern end bas 

 been encroached upon by streets and dwellings. What its height may 

 originally have been can be only a matter of conjecture, as time and 

 the elements have combined to reduce it nearly to a level with the 

 surrounding soil ; and its top has given birth and nourishment to 

 mighty trees, long since yielded up to the rapacity of the lumberman, 

 many of whose stumps, half decayed, yet exhibit more than four hun- 

 dred rings of annular growth. This, too, is but one of a series of five 

 dams upon the same stream grouped in a space of little more than two 

 miles. The Indians have no knowledge or tradition regarding it, 

 though they frequently discovered " stone- wood " (fossil-wood) bear- 

 ing the marks of beaver-teeth, at the points where the streams forced 

 the barrier. 



Of more recent beaver-dams, the writer has examined a few that 

 may be held remarkable. Besides the one near Washington Mine, be- 

 fore mentioned, one on the Ely Branch of the Ish-Jco-naw-ha (on the 

 maps misspelled Escanaha)^ in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, giv- 

 ing origin to a pond, with an area of nearly one hundred acres, known 

 as " Grass Lake " ; its length is two hundred and sixty feet. A third 

 in the same peninsula, four hundred and eighty feet long, is on Carp 

 River. But the largest is to be found on Sable River, in New Bruns- 

 wick, and floods upward of one thousand acres of land at an average 

 depth of two feet. Mr. Thompson, whose writings are deemed most 

 authentic, speaking of a dam visited by him in New Brunswick, in 

 1794, says : 



" My guide informed me we should have to pass over a long beaver- 

 dam. I naturally expected to lead our horses carefully over, but on 

 coming to it found a strip of apparently old and solid ground, covered 

 with short grass, and wide enough for two horses to easily walk 

 abreast. The lower side showed a descent of seven feet, and steep, 

 with a rill of water beneath. The side of the dam next the pond was 

 a gentle slope, and the pond itself a sheet of water a mile and a half 

 square, surrounded by low, grassy banks. The trees about were mostly 

 poplars and aspens, with numerous stumps, whose trunks had been cut 

 down and carried away by the beavers." In two places in this pond 

 were observed clusters of houses " like miniature villages." 



One is usually disappointed with the first view of a beaver's house. 

 Instead of the symmetrical, round, plastered dome we are led to expect 

 from most popular accounts, there is seen instead an irregular pile of 

 sticks, mingled with rushes, grass, and stones, broad at the base as 

 compared with the height, and of the same general order of architect- 

 ure as the dam. Apparently devoid of system, it resembles nothing 

 so much as a gigantic crow's nest turned upside down by the border 

 of a pond or stream. And yet, though they are not plastered smooth- 

 ly, and the interior exhibits but rough walls merely evened by cutting 



