ervers.

The teeth--those great friends of the closet naturalist, which help him
to whole pages of speculation--have enabled him to separate the beaver
from the musquash, although the whole history and habits of these
creatures prove them to be congeners, as much as a mastiff is the
congener of a greyhound--indeed, far more. So like are they in a
general sense, that the Indians call them "cousins."

In form the muskrat differs but little from the beaver. It is a thick,
rounded, and flat-looking animal, with blunt nose, short ears almost
buried in the fur, stiff whiskers like a cat, short legs and neck, small
dark eyes, and sharply-clawed feet. The hinder ones are longest, and
are half-webbed. Those of the beaver are full-webbed.

There is a curious fact in connection with the tails of these two
animals. Both are almost naked of hair, and covered with "scales," and
both are flat. The tail of the beaver, and the uses it makes of this
appendage, are things known to every one. Every one has read of its
trowel-shape and use, its great breadth, thickness, and weight, and its
resemblance to a cricket-bat. The tail of the muskrat is also naked,
covered with scales, and compressed or flattened; but instead of being
horizontally so, as with the beaver, it is the reverse; and the thin
edges are in a vertical plane. The tail of the former, moreover, is not
of the trowel-shape, but tapers like that of the common rat. Indeed,
its resemblance to the house-rat is so great as to render it a somewhat
disagreeable object to look upon.

Tail and all, the muskrat is about twenty inches in length; and its body
is about half as big as that of a beaver. It possesses a strange power
of contracting its body, so as to make it appear about half its natural
size, and to enable it to pass through a chink that animals of much
smaller dimensions could not enter.

Its colour is reddish-brown above, and light-ash underneath. There are
eccentricities, however, in this respect. Specimens have been found
quite black, as also mixed and pure white. The fur is a soft, thick
down, resembling that of the beaver, but not quite so fine. There are
long rigid hairs, red-coloured, that overtop the fur; and these are also
sparely scattered over the tail.

The habits of the muskrat are singular--perhaps not less so than those
of his "cousin" the beaver, when you strip the history of the latter of
its many exaggerations. Indeed the former animal,