BEAVERS AND THEIR WAYS. 267 
long together being of very short breath; and therefore is fain 
often to put his head up above water for air: he biteth very hard, 
and loveth to be among fishes, or where they are: he may be 
like a thief in this thing, for he loveth to lye in the way that 
passengers come oftenest by...... He loveth to be upon 
the banks of rivers and in those places where trees grow 
close to the water; and there he will sit with his body on 
the tree and his tail in the water: his subtelty is seen in this, 
that he will make a tree hollow with his teeth as if it were 
made sO by art....... The tree that he thus holloweth 
he maketh three cells in it, one above another; and if it raineth 
so that the tree is full of water, then he goeth up a storey 
higher, and according as the water decreaseth or increaseth, 
so he goeth up higher or lower in the tree; yet so that still he 
may keep his body dry, and his tail in the water. 
“This may teach us,” he says, ‘“‘to forsee dangers that are 
coming upon us, and to arm ourselves against them.” 
The way in which some of these old writers loved ‘‘ to point 
a moral and adorn a tale”? must strike readers at the present 
day as somewhat amusing. 
According to Albertus Magnus, a tree being cut down and 
prepared by Beavers, they take one of the oldest of their 
company (whose teeth are useless for cutting purposes) and 
make him lie flat on his back, pile up the wood upon him, 
neatly packed between his fore and hind limbs, and then drag 
him by the tail to the water-side, where their huts are to be 
built. He forgets that by such a process all the fur would be 
rubbed the wrong way, a course of treatment which no animal 
could be expected to submit to with complaisance. 
Topsel, in his ‘ History of Four-footed Beasts,’ 1658, describes 
the size of the Beaver as ‘‘not much bigger than a countrey 
dog,’ but he omits to mention the size of the dog! The tail, 
he observes, ‘“‘ he useth for a stern when he swimmeth after fish 
to catch them.” 
Another fable, attributed to Agricola, asserts that the Beaver 
keeps the Otter in subjection, makes him sit upon his tail in 
time of cold and frost, and keep moving about in the water in 
order to prevent it from freezing. 
A mistranslation, or misunderstanding of an author’s meaning, 
sometimes leads to amusing results. Pliny, writing of the 
