"We thus recognize 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 pos- 

 sessed ; and the same reasons that confer an in- 

 terest on the evidences of the extinction of 

 species, as illustrating the like process still go- 

 ing 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 seemingl}-, like the Aboriginal Indian 

 of this continent, to pass away from the records 

 of living nature. 



Sir Daniel Wilson — 1S58. 



