380 EARLY NOTICES OF THE BEAVER. 



proofs of an acquaintance with the gregarious habits and constructive instincts of 

 the beaver, at a time long anterior to the discovery of America, and to the more 

 widely diffused linowledge which followed gradually upon the narratives of the 

 voyagers of the New Continent. It is surprising that Buffon, whose elegance of 

 style so I'arely appears as an excuse for carelessness and inerudition, should not 

 only have overlooked this fact, but the evidence of all the more recent authorities 

 we have quoted, as well as of others to a like purport, occurring in his own day. 

 The beavers of Europe, says this eminent writer, never assemble in colonies, and 

 never construct, but merely burrow, although he admits what is not nearly enough, 

 that in Norway, and other parts of the extreme north, their huts have been reported 

 to be found within the last centuries. Cuvier appears to have followed Buffon, in 

 assuming that the European beavers, at least in later ages never build ; and states 

 the difficulty he has had in attempting to determine, whether those which now 

 have their burrows along the Rhone, the Danube, the Weser, and other rivers, are 

 originally different from the American species, or whetl>er they are identical, and 

 are hindered from building solely by their position in the nearer vicinity of man. 

 "While grateful that the eloquence of Buffon, and the comprehensiveness and pre- 

 cision of Cuvier, have given a charnn and a solidity to natural history unknown to 

 it before, it is to wonder the more that it should have been easy for us to supple- 

 ment their inquiries, on this curious point, from sources so readily accessible. To 

 approach even our own times, Bechstein, writing so recently as 1801, tells us that 

 on the Elbe, near Kahnert, the property of the Prussian minister, Schulenberg, 

 there were then many beavers, which constructed dams on the side channels, or 

 arms of the river, where there was calm water. Near Wittenberg also, they lived 

 in societies, and formed dams. In the vicinity of Hettinghausen, on the Lippe, 

 they built their dams, and were found in considerable numbers; as well as higher 

 up the river in the territory of Paderborn. In these localities, their constructions 

 are stated to have been so skilful as to rival those of Canada, though the colonies 

 were less numerous. The trees they cut down were willows and poplars. Oken 

 mentions a beaver-hut on the Tesil, in the duchy of Cleves, which stood six feet 

 high, with tvfo chambers over each other, the upper having three, and the under 

 four cells ; and he refers to a paper by Meyerink, in the Berlin Natural History 

 Transactions for 1829, describing a colony settled for upwards of a century, on the 

 little river Nuthe, half a league above its confluence with the Elbe, in a sequestra- 

 ted canton of the district of Megdeburg. In 1822, it contained from fifteen to twenty 

 individuals: they had burrows; built huts eight or ten feet high, using trunks and 

 branches of trees, along with earth; and constructed a dyke. Martins, writing in 

 1837, speaks of colonies on the Ammer, which were still tended as objects of 

 forestry, or huntsman's craft. An authority, at the close of the last century assigns 

 to them many localities in Germany : as in Mark, especially in the Altmark and 

 Preignitz, and in the Middle Mark ; and in the rivers Spree and Havel, in the 

 vicinities of Berlin, Potsdam, Oranienberg, Liebenwulde, Trebbin, Naueu, and 

 Konigshorst. 



" Even close to the present day, the beaver, though scanty in its relative numbers, 

 has a wider distribution in Europe than is usually imagined. "Wagner, writing in 

 1846, mentions it as still not only in the Danube, but in the Amber, Isar, lUer, 



