File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17539641033).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo14amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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134 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL in the group, grass and willows often take root and convert the dam into a wooded island. The dams, which serve to protect the houses by surrounding them with water, are chiefly for pur- poses of transportation and enable the animals to bring to their houses the branches whose bark serves as food. Mills styles the beaver " the original conservationist" and calls attention to the part he and his dams have played in agriculture by converting streams into marshes and subsequently into broad flat meadows. Here the palje- ontologist should join the farmer in a vote of thanks, for some of the best preserved skeletons of mastodons (like that in the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences) have been found imbedded in the mud of old-time beaver ponds. The remarkable things that beavers actually do in nature are nothing to what they do in books, and just as children say the brightest things their parents can think of, so an animal's natural intelligence (or that which seems to be intelligence) loses nothing in the telling, and some marvelous tales have been told of the beaver. The account of Le Beau might well excite the admira- tion and envy of some of our more modern writers. The company of beavers uniting to fell the large tree is a brilliant flight of fancy wherein the writer has been ably seconded by the artist. The most widespread fallacy, and the
Text Appearing After Image:
Black ash cut by bsavers near Port Kent, New York. Gift of \V. H. Howell. The cuttings show characteristic marks of the beaver's teeth

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