76 Dr. Wilson's Noles on the 



Notes on the Prior Existence of the Castor Fiber in Scotland. 

 By Charles Wilson, M.D., F.R.C.P.E. 



As a member of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, I beg 

 to transmit the following notes on the former existence of the 

 Castor Fiber, or Beaver, in Scotland ; as suggested by a dis- 

 covery of the remains of the interesting animal in a locality 

 familiar to many of the Club's oldest members, and lying 

 within the immediate circuit of its researches. 



That the beaver was at one time indigenous in Scotland 

 has been long known, and has, especially, already been noted 

 by Dr. Neill of Edinburgh, in an interesting paper^ read in 

 1819 before the Wernerian Natural History Society. Dr. 

 Neill adduces two then known examples of the occurrence of 

 the remains of the animal. The record of the first instance is 

 derived from the Minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of 

 Scotland, dated in December 1788; where it appears that Dr. 

 Farquharson presented to the Society the skeleton of the head 

 and one of the haunch-bones of a beaver, found on the margin 

 of the Loch of Marlee, a small lake in the parish of Kinloch, 

 in Perthshire, near the foot of the Grampian Mountains. The 

 lake had been partially drained for the sake of the marl 

 which it contained ; and, in the process of excavation, under 

 a bed" of peat-moss between five and six feet thick, the beaver's 

 skeleton was discovered. In a neighbouring marl-pit, a pair 

 of deer's horns, branched, and of large dimensions, were found 

 nearly at the same time ; and, along with these, two bones, 

 which our eminent anatomist Dr. Barclay suggested to have 

 been probably the metatarsal bones of a large species of deer, 

 contemporary with the beaver, but now, like it, extinct in our 

 country. The relics of this beaver are still preserved in the 

 Museum of the Royal Antiquarian Society in Edinburgh, 

 where, like Dr. Neill, I have myself examined them. They 

 appear to be those of an animal which had reached maturity. 

 The back part of the cranium is gone, and the left zygomatic 

 arch is broken ; but the " haunch bone," or left os innomina- 

 tum, is entire. A part of one side of the lower jaw-bone is 

 also broken, and here only some remains of the very charac- 

 teristic incisors still exist. The bones are dyed of a deep 

 chocolate colour, the natural result of their long contact with 

 the peaty substance. 



The second instance adduced by Dr. Neill occurred in 

 October 1818, on the estate of Kimmerghame, in the parish 



♦Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society, vol. iii. (1821), p. 207- 



