BEAVER. 



-J49 



bark for their subsistence, arc placed in the water 

 close by the " angle," or entrance porch. Where 

 there is a current they are placed above the entrance, 

 and fastened with stones ; but where the water is com- 

 paratively still, either by being' a lake, or from the 

 existence of a dam, they are placed indiscriminately. 

 When the party inhabiting the same house is nu- 

 merous, the store of provisions is considerable, con- 

 sisting of a curt load of twigs and branches. The 

 store is said to be a joint collection by all the inmates 

 of the house, but by them only, though the colony 

 should, as it sometimes does, consist of a village of a 

 dozen houses or more. The house is also the work 

 of those only by whom it is to be inhabited ; but the 

 dam is a work of joint labour. The celerity with 

 which they build the latter, and especially with which 

 they repair any injury which it may sustain, is won- 

 derful, as compared with the slow progress of works 

 of proportional magnitude among men ; but it is not 

 more wonderful than that by which ants repair 

 any injury which is done to their hills. There is one 

 circumstance in the construction of these dams 

 which our mechanical knowlege very imperfectly 

 reaches or explains ; and that is, how, considering the 

 light materials of which they are composed, and the 

 total absence of piles, or any other means of protec- 

 tion, the} r get them to stand till they are closed. It is 

 true that they are never erected in very rapid cur- 

 rents, and that the time of their erection is one in 

 which there is but little risk from floods and inequa- 

 lities of the rivers ; but still, if even a clever engineer 

 were called upon to build of similar materials such a 

 dam as the beaver builds, and to build it in the same 

 manner, he would find many difficulties in the execu- 

 tion. It does not appear, either, that the current or 

 fall of water over the beaver dams acts behind the 

 foundation, which is very apt to be the case with dams 

 and weirs of human construction, unless they have a 

 " tail" of solid pavement carried out to a consider- 

 able distance, with its longitudinal section something 

 in the parabolic form ; and even then the duration of 

 the work appears to depend as much, at least, upon 

 the strength of the materials as upon the mechanical 

 skill which regulates the form of the work. 



Thus, viewed in all their bearings, the mechanical 

 labours of the beavers are, assuredly, not less won- 

 derful or worthy of study, when we take them simply 

 as animal labourers, than when we strain the imagi- 

 nary comparison between them and the contrived 

 works of man, to the very utmost pitch to which 

 romancing and extravagant fancy has ventured to go ; 

 and there is this advantage in the plain and rational 

 study of them, that they contain something yet to be 

 known, which cannot fail in being useful to us when 

 we do know it, whereas we can learn nothing from 

 the romance which judges of them from human art as 

 the standard. The structures formed by these ani- 

 mals vary with the situations in which they are 

 placed ; but the highly graphic representation by 

 Landseer, on the plate " Beavers," will give a very 

 good general notion of both the scenery and the 

 habitation. 



Even in those situations where beavers do not 

 require to range far from their winter habitations 

 during the summer, they do not then make use of 

 them as places of rest. They generally form small 

 detached burrows in the banks, and these, like their 

 winter houses, often have their entrances under water. 

 It seems, indeed, that beavers, as might indeed be 



supposed by their aquatic powers of locomotion being 

 superior to their land ones, prefer journeying by 

 water in all cases where the journey is of considerable 

 length. They are thus bank animals even at that 

 season when they depend upon the growing produce 

 of the land. In this respect they bear some resem- 

 blance to those cetaceous animals (to the lamantines, 

 for instance) which inhabit the large rivers in the 

 tropical parts of the world which reside chiefly in the 

 water during the day, and come on shore to browse 

 the vegetation on the banks, during the night or in 

 the twilight. Like these, the beavers are nocturnal 

 feeders, and are seldom on land during the heat of 

 the day, though they spend more of their time in 

 their resting places than in the water, whereas the her- 

 bivorous cetacea take theirrest in the shallows of the 

 rivers. Beavers are, indeed, fond of sporting in the 

 water, although it is only a pathway and a means of 

 floatage to them, and not a pasture from which they 

 immediately derive their food. But this is what we 

 might suppose ; for living as the beaver lives, and 

 feeding as it feeds, the water is necessary to its exist- 

 ence ; and it is a general, and, at the same time, a 

 very benevolent and beautiful law of nature, that 

 whatever is in ordinary circumstances necessary to 

 the well-being of an animal, affords it pleasure in 

 proportion to the 'necessity. This pleasure does not 

 consist in the mere utility ; as, for instance, the plea- 

 sure of the water to the beaver does not arise from 

 the food which that element enables it to reach, or 

 from the building materials which that element enables 

 it to transport. The pleasure is in the mere fact of 

 swimming in the water ; and if it were a case in 

 which we could at all admit the relation of cause and 

 effect, we would be much more correct in saying that 

 the pleasure is the cause getting the food and the 

 materials, and not the desire of possessing these the 

 cause of the pleasure. 



And we ourselves may here learn of the beaver : 

 " Go to the beasts, and they shall teach," says an 

 author of high authority ; and one equally high puts 

 this question : " Is not the life more than meat, and 

 the body than raiment?" This last instruction is 

 put in the form of a question, in order more forcibly 

 to draw our attention to it ; for He by whom it is put 

 knew every instinct of nature and every thought of 

 man, and thus stood in need of no confirmation. 

 When " the life," in man, is in this manner put in op- 

 position to, or as distinct from, " the body" it always 

 means the intellectual part that which can learn, aiid 

 know, and think ; and in the passage above quoted, 

 the contrast of " the body" with " raiment," is that of 

 the exercise of our faculties with all those things 

 which, under the name of wealth, the exercise of our 

 faculties procures or accumulates. The first part of 

 the lesson, that which relates to the intellectual 

 power, is to man only : the second is to every crea- 

 ture, though man is the only one to whom it needs to 

 be repeated. Those creatures depart not from their 

 instincts. The pleasure of the beaver, for instance, 

 is on the bank or in the stream, and he attempts not 

 to wander over the thirsty plain, or to climb the 

 rugged mountain. A being of matter, and of such 

 life only as can exist in matter, all his faculties, and 

 all their operations, are as determinate under the cir- 

 cumstances which admits of their existence, as the 

 falling of a rock is when the lightning shatters it from 

 the perpendicular cliff. Accordingly, neither the 

 beaver nor any other animal ever sacrifices its true 



