the resources in the
way of food which the fields of the tropical and temperate zones can
supply; the chances of the arctic regions may then have much
importance to our successors. Moreover, in the case of the seals we
find the peculiar advantage that the animals are fed entirely from the
sea, so that the domestication of these forms would give to man a
means, the like of which he has never possessed, whereby he would be
enabled to harvest the food resources of the deep.

The beaver, particularly the North American form, offers a most
attractive opportunity for a great and far-reaching experiment in
domestication. On this continent, at least, the creature exhibits a
range of attractive qualities which is exceeded by none other in the
whole range of the lower mammalian life. No other mammal below man shows
anything like the same constructive skill in the contrivance of its
habitations, or is able so to modify its habits of building to meet the
varied needs of its life. When this country was first visited by man
near one half of its area was occupied by this species. It built its
dams and dwelling-places and, when necessary, excavated its canals along
all the lesser streams in the timbered regions of the northern
districts. As the destructive effects of civilization increased, the
animal has gradually, to a great extent, been driven away from its old
haunts, and where it remains it has, as the price of life, given up its
architectural habits and betaken itself to the older and simpler mode of
living in a chance manner much as is now the habit of the European
variety. As an illustration of this I may note, in passing, that before
the civil war, when all the recesses of the forests in the region about
Richmond, Virginia, had for more than a century been industriously
explored by hunters, the beaver was supposed to be extinct in the
district; yet during the civil war, as I am credibly informed, a colony
of these creatures became established near the town of Suffolk, and
there, amid the roar of a great conflict in which men ceased to seek the
lesser game, they recovered their habit of building dams, which we must
believe to have been discontinued for many generations. This capacity to
vary action with reference to changing needs is the best possible index
of the mental power of animals. Guided by the exhibition that has been
given us by the beavers, we are justified in considering them to be the
one group of mammals which ha