EARLY NOTICES OF THE BEAVER. 373 



Lake, the beaver seldom took to the water. It used to He before the 

 fire as contentedly as a dog ; and it was not till winter set in that it 

 became a nuisance. Poor old Bill McHugh's house was well ventilat- 

 ed, an open chink between the logs being thought very little of, by 

 him and his family ; but the beaver was very impatient of such neg- 

 ligence, and used to work all night at making things airtight and com- 

 fortable, without much discrimination as to the materials it employed. 

 If Bill or his guests went to bed leaving their moccasins and tichigans 

 drying before the fire, they were certain to be found in the morning 

 stowed away in some chink or cranny ; and stray blankets and articles 

 of clothing were torn up by the industrious beaver, for the same pur- 

 pose. The consequence was that the poor pet was at length sacrificed ; 

 its body went into the old trader's pot, and its skin to market." When 

 we consider the peculiar shyness of the beaver in its native haunts, — 

 in so much so that, where it is liable to frequent disturbance in the 

 vicinity of the Settlements, it is scarcely possible to get a sight even 

 of its head above water after watching for hours, — the readiness with 

 which it abandons all its wild habits and natural instincts, and adapts 

 stself to sociable companionship with man, constitutes a trait of pecu- 

 liar interest. 



Such being some of the aspects in the natural history of the 

 beaver. Castor Fiber, as studied in its comparatively recently disturbed 

 haunts in the New World, some interest may naturally be felt by us 

 here, in the recovery of like traces of its former presence in numerous 

 localities of the Old World, from which it has disappeared for centu- 

 ries. The relations of the European beaver to pharmacology and 

 miedicine have attracted a degree of attention to it in earlier times, to 

 which we owe much of the knowledge now recoverable concerning its 

 early history and wide diffusion. The medicinal virtues attached to 

 the castoreum in early and medieval times were of the most varied and 

 even contradictory kind. Hippocrates recommended its employment 

 in uterine diseases, while Dioscorides and many later writers prescribe 

 it for accelerating child-birth. According to Pliny, when applied ex- 

 ternally to the head the castoreum induced sleep, but when used in 

 fumigation it removed lethargy. Its uses and virtues might indeed 

 compare with the most wonderful of modern universal quack medi- 

 cines. Those have been carefully investigated in Dr. Charles Wilson's 

 "Notes on the use of the Castoreum," and to them we can only add^ 

 from the New World, two others to which it is applied in the great 



