THE CO IP US. 



PLATE XXXVIII. 



Class Mammalia. Order Rodentia : knawing. Genus 



Coipus. Species Myopotamus. 



THE Couia, or Coipus, is a most important animal in a 

 commercial point of view. The fine under-fur which invests 

 its body being extensively employed^ like that of the beaver, 

 in the manufacture of hats, thousands of its skins are annu- 

 ally imported into Europe, under the name of racoonda, and 

 have for nearly forty years supplied the markets, while the 

 animal itself remained unknown to the scientific world. The 

 Coipus belongs to the rodent order, and constitutes the sole 

 example of a genus allied in some respects to that of the 

 beaver, yet differing from it in many external as well as ana- 

 tomical characters ; while at the same time it is no less evi- 

 dently allied to the genera hydromys and ondatra. 



Though unnoticed till very lately by naturalists, we are 

 not to suppose that the older writers have left us no traces of 

 its history ; on the contrary, we have clear references to it. 

 Until GeofTroy St. Hilaire however published a memoir of the 

 animal in 1805, these references had been overlooked or dis- 

 regarded. Commerson had even figured it, but to that figure 

 no attention was paid, till in looking over the vast collection 

 of skins in the storehouses of M. Bechem, a furrier at Paris, 

 Geoffroy St. Hilaire was struck with the resemblance which 

 the skins of this animal bore to the figure in question. Of 

 these skins M. Bechem never received less than 1000, and often 

 from 15 to 20,000 annually, and had long been in the habit of 

 employing the fur for the same purpose as that of the beaver, 

 having observed the similarity of texture between them. 



Commerson, who was a naturalist of great eminence, ap- 

 pears to have understood very clearly the systematic affinities 

 of the Coipus : he regarded it with justice as the type of a 



