3 12 
THE CANADIAN BE A VER 
and superior to that of man in the development 
of the New World. The exaggerated descriptions of 
the beaver-lodges and engineering feats given by the 
early French Canadians, hardly deserve the authors 
condemnation ; the works themselves are~so complete 
and so ingenious, that the symmetrical additions of 
early explorers add but little to the facts which their 
incomplete observations only partially grasped. That 
a creature whose engineering structures were based, 
consciously or unconsciously, on principles only 
known to highly civilized man, should embellish 
them with conveniences known to half-civilized man, 
was a natural inference ; and to credit the beaver with 
a wish to insert windows in the walls of his lodge was 
no great flight of fancy to men who had seen with 
their own eyes that the same animal could construct 
a dyke a mile long, with the precise section which 
human experience has determined to be that best 
adapted to resist the forces of pent-up water. Mr. 
Martin has so well fulfilled the promise of his title- 
page, to present an “ exhaustive monograph popularly 
written ” on the life and history of the beaver, that 
an attempt to follow the varied commercial, historical, 
and palaeontological references in which the story of 
the beaver abounds, would be impossible. It will, 
perhaps, be sufficient to consider the main questions 
of the extraordinary intelligence exhibited by the 
animal, and the possibility of its preservation from the 
total destruction with which the species is now 
threatened. So far as the most careful modern 
