EARLY NOTICES OF THE BEAVER. 387 



"In a German charter dated in 1103, the right of hunting beavers is conferred 

 . along -with other huntings and fisliings ; and a Bull of Pope Lucius III, in the year 

 1182, bestows upon a monastery the property in the beavers within their bounds. 

 In comparatively recent times, Mylius cites a Prussian royal edict, regarding the 

 beaver in the Elbe, dated 20th January 1714 ; with a subsequent one, insisting 

 upon its protection under a penalty of no less than 200 dollars, issued at Berlin on 

 the 24th March 1725. It was doubtless under a similar policy, that Frederick II. 

 is reported to have gathered together a large colony of beavers, that he might turn 

 them to economic uses : but with so little success, says Zimmermann, that they 

 became afterwards dispersed throughout Brandenburg, and were soon I'arely en- 

 countered. 



Streso, a Dutch writer, states that the animal was used as food in Holland, in the 

 time of the Crusades ; and he repeats the common notice, that its tail and pawa 

 were eaten as fish, with a safe conscience, during the religious fasts. But the 

 monks of a convent of Chartreux, at Villeneuve-les^Avignon, seem to have carried 

 this indulgent notion farther, and to have accounted their entire carcass among the 

 ' mets maigres f preparing from it large quantities of sausages, which were sold, 

 and liighly prized in the adjoining country. Albertus Magnus, however, says that 

 their whole flesh was abominable, except the tail. Gesner describes the mode in 

 which it was rendered savoury by the Swiss, he himself relishing the choicer por- 

 tions as sweet and tender, 'jure croceo conditos,' Belon als» tells us that its tail, 

 which, he says, sometimes weighs four lbs., was in his day used in Lorraine during 

 Lent, and accounted a great delicacy, ,having a close resemblance in flavour to a 

 nicely-dressed eel. The northern nations, according to Olaus Magnus, agreed with 

 he rest in considering the tail and paws as highly delicate morsels." 



We thus recognise 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 possessed ; and the same 

 ; reasons that confer an interest on the evidences of the extinction of 

 species, as illustrating the like process still going 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 seem- 

 ingly, like the Aboriginal Indian of this continent, to pass away from 

 the records of living nature. 



