THE BEAVER 671 



ance and position in the Beaver, and their secretion has a similarly 

 pungent odour. Therefore the name may have easily been transferred 

 from one animal to the other in a region where one of the two species 

 was absent. Be this as it may, there is no room for doubting that the 

 Greeks were referring to the Beaver ; and although some of them, as 

 Aristotle, were perhaps describing it from hearsay, others, as Herodotus, 

 Dioscorides, and Strabo had a personal knowledge of the animal. 

 Dioscorides pointed out that the castor-sacks were quite distinct from 

 the testes, and that the widespread belief that the Beaver, aware of the 

 object of the chase, castrated himself before the hunter in order to 

 obtain deliverance, was nothing but a fable. Strabo described the 

 Beaver as inhabiting the rivers of Spain, and mentions that the Spanish 

 castoreum had less strength than that of the Beavers of Asia Minor. 

 This latter statement may have been well founded, since it is known 

 that the nature of the food has no small influence upon the quality of 

 the secretion. 



The name of the Beaver among the Romans was properly fiber, 

 while Castor was at a later date borrowed from the Greeks ; thus Pliny 

 speaks of "fibri, quos castores vacant " ; castor had nothing to do with 

 the Latin castrare. Varro, Festus, and more recently Harting have 

 sought the origin of fiber in fibrum, the bank of a stream, but there 

 seems little reason to doubt that^^^^ is a derivative of bebhrus, which 

 probably came into the language by the Celtic route ; the mode in 

 which the initial b was transformed into f may be indicated by 

 mentioning the Provencal vibri. Varro speaks of Beavers in the 

 rivers of Latium, and a line in a fragmentary work of Plautus, " Sic me 

 subes cotidio quasi fiber salicem," suggests that at about 200 B.C. the 

 people of Umbria, Central Italy, had a personal acquaintance with the 

 habits of this animal. 



We are indebted to Lord Kilbracken {per Cocks) for referring us to 

 Dante's Inferno (c. xvii., lines 19 to 25) : — 



" Come tal volta stanno a riva i burchi, 



che parte sono in acqua e parte in terra ; 

 e come Ik tra li Tedeschi lurchi ' 



lo bevero s'assetta a far sua guerra : 

 cosi la fiera pessima si stava 

 su rorlo che, di pietra, il sabbion serra." 



"As at times the wherries lie on shore, that are part in water and 

 part on land ; and as there amongst the guzzling Germans the beaver 

 adjiists himself to wage his war : so lay that worst of savage beasts 

 upon the brim which closes the great sand with stone." 



Dante, writing about 13 10, thus uses the Beaver as an illustration 

 familiar to his Italian readers ; that he indicates a German instead of 

 an Italian colony of these animals may be due to the fact that he could 



