260 AUDUBON THE NATURALIST 
CHAPTER XIX. 
THE BEAVER. 
hte sagacity and instinct of the beaver have 
from time immemorial been the subject of 
admiration and wonder. The early writers on 
both continents have represented it as a ra- 
tional, intelligent, and moral being, requiring 
but the faculty of speech to raise it almost’ to 
an equality, in some respects, with our own 
species. There is in the composition of every 
man, whatever may be his pride in his philoso- 
phy, a proneness in a greater or less degree to 
superstition, or at least credulity. The world 
is at best but slow to be enlightened, and the 
trammels thrown around us by the tales of the 
nursery are not easily shaken off. Travellers 
into the northern parts of Europe who wrote 
marvellous accounts of the habits of the beavers 
in northern Europe, seem to have worked on 
‘he imaginations and confused the intellects of 
the early explorers of our northern regions. 
They excited the enthusiasm of Buffon, whose 
