•'We thus reco.sfnize in the beaver, which 

 has disappeared within recent generations from 

 so many of its Canadian haunts, and now lin- 

 gers in greatly diminished numbers only in the 

 least accessible waters, the survivor of a species 

 familiar to man in remote centuries, rendered 

 popular in the fables of ^sop, and noted by 

 Herodotus, Hippocrates, Pliny and Strabo. The 

 last relics of the extinct Dodo have acquired a 

 value the living animal never could have pos- 

 sessed ; and the same reasons that confer an in- 

 terest on the evidences of the extinction of 

 species, as illustrating the like process still go- 

 ing on which geology reveals in the whole past 

 economy of life, render the beaver of the Old 

 and the New World worthy of special notice, as 

 destined seemingly, like the Aboriginal Indian 

 of this continent, to pass away from the records 

 of living nature. 



Sir Daniel \Vilso7i — 1S58. 



