On the Fur Trade, and Fur-hearing- Animals. 311 



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Art. Vll. — On the Fur Trade, and Fur-hearing Animals. 



TO PROFESSOR SILLIMATT. 



Sir, — Deeming the fur trade one of our national interests, and 

 presuming that many of its valuable details are unknown to most 

 of your readers, I send the following sketches relating to the trade, 

 and to fur-bearing animals ; which, if they can be admitted into yonr 

 Journal, may be found both interesting and useful.'^ 



The skins of animals were employed for clothing from the earliest 

 periods; " coats of skins" having been given to our first parents, even 

 before their expulsion from Eden. As the human race grew numer- 

 ous, the supply was deficient; and when the southern latitudes be- 

 came inhabited and men formed societies, and lived in fixed habita- 

 tions, civilization developed ingenuity and taste, devising various fab- 

 rics of wool, linen and silk. These were of every variety of form and 

 pattern, rivalling the rainbow in hues, and ornamented with resem- 

 blances of every object of beauty. They were also light and cool, 

 adapted to the sunny skies of southern and middle Asia. The val- 

 lies of the Euphrates and Tigris, and of the Nile, as well as Syria 

 and Mesopotamia, were early occupied by highly civilized nations, 

 enjoying the luxuries of manufactures and arts. It was principally 

 the natives of northern and mountainous regions, and their imme- 

 diate borders, who were habitually clad in furs, and skins ; except 

 those horsemen shepherds, who, wrapped in furs, traversed the im- 

 mense steppe on the north of the Aral, Caspian, and Euxine seas, 

 including the intervening range of the Caucasus, and extending west 

 to the mouth of the Danube. These barbarians, under " the name 

 of Scythians," occasionally forced the mountain passes and ravaged 

 the plains of Mesopotamia and Syria. Their hostile incursions open- 

 ed the way to a commercial intercourse, and in the progress of time 

 the manufactures of Babylonia and Persia were exchanged for the 

 horses, cattle and^wrs, brought by these savages from the forests on 

 the north of " the treeless plains" of Scythia. 



* I am indebted to Mr. Aikin's paper on fur and the fur trade, published in 

 the Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and 

 Commerce, 1830, London; and to several intelligent merchants of New York, for 

 much of the information contained in the following- article. 



