386 
YEPvTEBEATA. 
north of Europe, by wtich — thougli the account is no doubt exaggerated — it appears that in their 
chief pecuharity they there display the same instincts as their American congeners : 
"The beaver is instinctively led to build his house near the banks of lakes and rivers. He 
saws with his teeth birch-trees, with which the building is constructed; with his teeth he drags 
the wood along to the place destined for building his habitation; in this maiiner one piece of tim- 
ber is carried after another where they choose. At the lake or river, where their house is to be 
built, they lay birch-stocks or trunks, covered with their bark, in the bottom itself, and forming a 
foundation, they complete the rest of the building with so much art and ingenuity as to excite 
the admiration of the beholders. The house itself is of a round and arched figure, equaling in its 
circumference the ordinary hut of a Laplander. In this house the floor is for a bed, covered with 
branches of trees, not in the very bottom, but a little above, near the edge of a river or lake; so 
that, between the foundation and flooring, on which the dwelling is supported, there is formed, as 
it were, a cell, filled with water, in which the stalks of the birch-tree are put up; on the bark of 
this, the beaver family who inhabit this mansion feed. If there are more families under one roof, 
besides the laid flooring, another, resembling the former, is built a little above, which you may 
not improperly name a second story in the building. The roof of the dwelling consists of branches 
very closely compacted, and projects out far over the water. You have now, reader, a house con- 
sisting and laid out in a cellar, a flooring, a hypocaust, a ceiling, and a roof, raised by a brute an- 
imal, altogether destitute of reason, and also of the builder's art, with no less ingenuity than com- 
raodiousness." 
In confirmation of the preceding description — or at least in evidence of the building propensity 
of the European beaver — we copy the following anecdote, related by Geoff'roy St, Hilaire: "One 
of these beavers from the Rhone was confined in the Paris menagerie. Fresh branches were reg- 
ularly put into his cage, together with his food, consisting of vegetables, fruits, &c., to amuse him 
during the night, and minister to his gnawing propensity. He had only litter to shield him from 
the frost, and the door of his cage closed badly. One bitter winter-night it snowed, and the snow 
had collected in one corner. These were all his materials, and the poor beaver disposed of them 
to secure himself from the nipping air. The branches he interwove between the bars of his cage, 
precisely as a basket-maker would have done. In the intervals he placed his litter, his carrots, 
his apples, his all, fashioning each with his teeth so as to fit them to the spaces to be filled. To 
stop the interstices he covered the whole with snow, which froze in the night, and in the morning 
it was found that he had thus built a wall which occupied two-thirds of the doorway." 
While the beaver has thus been exterminated in Europe, except that a few linger along the 
borders of the rivers in the more thinly settled portions, and somewhat greater numbers exist in 
the forests of the north, in North America a similar process has been going on. Where, half a 
century ago, a hunter or trapper could kill four hundred in a year, they are already scarce, and 
are only to be found in sufiBcient numbers to make the pursuit a profession in the distant solitudes 
of the northwest. It was formerly spread over the whole of North America, and as appears, was 
so plentiful even in what constitutes the present State of New York, that two centuries ago, from 
eight to ten thousand skins were annually taken. The trade in beaver-skins was, indeed, one of 
the leading inducements to the early settlements and migrations of the colonists, English and 
French. Catesby speaks of it as found in Carolina, and Bartram in Florida; and the names of 
Beaver River, Beaver Creek, Beaver Dam, all over the country, show the universality of its dis- 
tribution throughout the whole United States. A few are still found in remote and unsettled 
parts as far south as Virginia, and thence northward through most of the Middle and Eastern 
States. In the Canadas, where it was once so abundant, it is rare, and is only plentiful in the 
vast wilds of the northwest — its range extending across the continent, and as high as 68° north 
latitude — the hunting-grounds of the Indians, Here there are still men who pursue the life of 
hunters and trappers, but while they are exposed to many hardships, and to the dangerous hos- 
tility or fatal caprice of the Indians, they rarely obtain a compensation, and never a fortune. 
Formerly, a skillful trapper obtained eighty beavers in the autumn, sixty in the spring, and three 
hundred in the summer, but less than half that number is now the usual fruit of a season's labor. 
The Indians are the chief pursuers of this, as well as the other fur-bearing animals of the North 
