350 



B E A V E R. 



enjoyment for the purposes of folly or of avarice. 

 The instinct of the beaver leads him to accumulate a 

 bundle of sticks for his winter provision ; but the 

 beaver never thinks of accumulating in one year a 

 stock which shall last him for twenty ; neither does he 

 seek to become a great beaver among beavers, " in 

 proportion to the magnitude of his heap," and look 

 with scorn upon the rest of the village, because 

 he has a few sticks more than they. Still, when 

 the season requires it, the beaver slackens not 

 the hand of his industry ; and unless when a casualty 

 of nature, which his instinct does not reach such as 

 an excessive frost, an overwhelming flood, a parching 

 drought in the summer, or one of those fearful conflagra- 

 tions which sometimes lay the natural forests in ashes, 

 and cause the pools to boil like cauldrons, overtakes 

 him, there is plenty, as well as peace and happiness, 

 in his dwelling. Turn from the hut of the beaver to 

 the dwelling of man, and be it cottage or be it palace, 

 say if the parallel holds. The record forbids the 

 affirmative, for, taking it from day to day, or from age 

 to age, a full third of it is the recital of crime, and 

 more than another third the recital of misery. 



And wherefore is it so ? Clearly for this reason, 

 that in man, and in man only of all creatures, there is 

 a departure from the law, a violation of some of those 

 statutes or principles, the full operation of all of which 

 would make the life of man, as it makes the life of 

 every other creature, one continued scene of enjoy- 

 ment This deviation can take place only in the in- 

 tellectual part of man's nature ; for, make a beast of 

 him, and, either there is no consistency or meaning 

 in nature, and no use in studying any thing about the 

 material creation, or he would be as faithful to his 

 instincts as other beasts. Thus man's deviation from 

 the law of nature, as proved by his crimes and their 

 necessary punishments, (for, though men often 

 remain ignorant of the crime or spare the guilty, 

 nay, though they often raise error and absurdity to 

 the seat of wisdom, and fall down and worship them 

 there, nature never does), is at once an irrefraga- 

 ble proof of the intellectual part of his nature, and 

 a ground of very bitter self-humiliation unless the 

 bitterness is made to become sweet, by finding out 

 what should be the course, and steadily following it. 



Now, as the things of this world are for this world 

 only, it is clear that the accumulation of them should 

 be a secondary operation with man inferior to the 

 exercise of the intellectual or higher part of his na- 

 ture, and therefore it should always be made to give 

 way to that. Not only so, but in the conducting of 

 it, man should follow the general law of the animals ; 

 because each of them is for this world as much as he 

 is, materially speaking, and some of them are for it 

 during a longer period. Consequently, even in the 

 acquiring of that which is necessary, the powers 

 exercised in the acquisition, or, in other words, the 

 exercise of those powers, should be man's chief plea- 

 sure, and he ought never to allow them to diminish, 

 or in any wise interfere with the natural charities of 

 his kind. The beaver collects his bundle of sticks ; 

 but in doing so these animals never abandon their 

 young, neither do they, by gloomy (and blasphemous) 

 anticipations that God shall in time become unable 

 to provide for all beavers that may be born, take 

 moral or immoral means of either preventing an 

 increase or diminishing the present number. Beavers 

 do indeed establish new colonies ; but there are no 

 commissioners or land agents among them ; they 



work exactly to the circumstances of the place and 

 the time, and therefore they work all-enjoyingly ; 

 and their population can at no time be said to be 

 redundant or defective. We, on the other hand, 

 taking a fraction, and generally a very small fraction, 

 of the case, legislate not only for the laws of nature 

 but for the succession of timr, and we need not won- 

 der that the statutes which we thus frame are as 

 senseless as the framers. Such is the beginning of 

 the lesson which the beaver teaches ; but we shall 

 not pursue it farther, as the introduction into works 

 on natural history, of such deductions, though really 

 the most useful part of the subject, is not yet sanc- 

 tioned by the custom of authors. 



In an economical point of view, the beaver is a 

 very valuable animal. The fur is more glossy and 

 beautiful than almost any other of the same fineness ; 

 it takes a rich black colour, without having its glo*s 

 in the least destroyed ; it wears well, and is not much 

 subject to injury from rain ; and it very readily unites 

 into a strong, though light and flexible fabric, by the 

 operation called felting. Hats are put together by 

 that operation, unless very inferior ones, in which 

 glue is applied in supplement, which of course spots 

 the hat, and refreshes with its unctuous droppings 

 the head of the wearer during rain ; and the fur of 

 the beaver has those qualities which render it a much 

 better material for hats than any other which is 

 known. Accordingly it was very early used for this 

 purpose ; and so exclusively used, when hats were 

 fewer and beavers more numerous, that both the 

 English and the Latin name of the animal became 

 synonimous for the article of dress. At one period it 

 was deemed necessary to enact statutes for prevent- 

 ing the admixture of any other material with the fur 

 of beavers in the manufacture of hats ; and at that 

 time the hat outlasted the wearer, and could be 

 washed in the same manner as a piece of woollen 

 cloth ; but in more modern times, owing partly to 

 the great decrease in the number of beavers, and 

 partly to the increased demand for hats, the article is 

 so expensive that no hat is made entirely of beaver. 

 The body is formed of wool, and that is plated over 

 with beaver, which is worked fully through the body, 

 or " felt," in good hats, but only very partially in 

 inferior ones. A shower takes the beaver off' the 

 latter ; and it is not very long in wearing bare, and 

 showing the felt in the former. 



The skin of the beaver is also used in the manu- 

 facture of gloves, and sometimes in that of shoes, 

 though in the latter case the shoe, like the bad hat, 

 requires a little glue to make it saleable. Even the 

 gloves are of very inferior quality, as the skin is 

 thick and very rough and loose in the texture ; so 

 that if it were not for the fur, the beavers would not 

 be deprived of their lives for the sake of their skins. 



There is another part of the beaver which is used 

 in medicine, though not so largely at present as for- 

 merly. It is a peculiarly unctuous product, secreted 

 by a follicle immediately under the tail of the animal. 

 It has a very disagreeable smell and nauseous taste, 

 but it was once in high request as an antispasmodic, 

 and also as producing an important and specific 

 action on the uterine system. It is still retained in 

 the Pharmacopoeia under the name of castoreum, or 

 castor. It is not our province to examine its virtues as 

 a drug ; but we may observe that it was introduced 

 into medicine at a time when nostrums were held as 

 being beneficial, very much in proportion as they 



