COUSIN ECHIDNA
The echidna—you can see one in the New York Zoo—is closely related to our duck-billed friend and is also a native of Australia. It uses that long, tapering nose and those claws to burrow for the ants on which it lives.
Still the scientists didn't know what to call this paradox of the animal kingdom; so they named him just that—paradoxicus, Ornythoryncus paradoxicus. A little Greek boy, without having to look it up in a dictionary, would have told us that "ornythoryncus" means "bird-billed"; for it's like those Greek picture words that always told their own story to the little Greeks. As for "paradox" if you don't know what that means, look it up in the dictionary and then look at the Ornythoryncus paradoxicus, and you'll understand.
[IV. The Beavers]
Of course you wouldn't like to be a duck-billed mole—nobody would, but I always thought it would be rather nice to be a beaver. The beaver is, in many ways, the most remarkable of all the water people that help make the lands that give us bread.
BEAVERS AT WORK AND AT PLAY
Whether he's working because he is more industrious than those beavers in the water or because it's recess time with them, the young beaver gnawing the tree seems to be having quite as good a time practising his profession as the others do in playing about.