The favourite food of the American beaver is the water-lily (Nuphar luteum), which bears a resemblance to a cabbage-stalk, and grows at the bottom of lakes and rivers. Beavers also gnaw the bark of birch, poplar and willow trees; but during the summer a more varied herbage, with the addition of berries, is consumed. When the ice breaks up in spring they always leave their embankments, and rove about until a little before the fall of the leaf, when they return to their old habitations, and lay in their winter stock of wood. They seldom begin to repair the houses till the frost sets in, and never finish the outer coating till the cold becomes severe. When they erect a new habitation they fell the wood early in summer, but seldom begin building till towards the end of August.
The flesh of the American beaver is eaten by the Indians, and when roasted in the skin is esteemed a delicacy and is said to taste like pork. Castoreum is a substance contained in two pear-shaped pouches situated near the organs of reproduction, of a bitter taste and slightly foetid odour, at one time largely employed as a medicine, but now used only in perfumery.
Fossil remains of beavers are found in the peat and other superficial deposits of England and the continent of Europe; while in the Pleistocene formations of England and Siberia occur remains of a giant extinct beaver, Trogontherium cuvieri, representing a genus by itself.
For an account of beavers in Norway see R. Collett, in the Bergens Museum Aarbog for 1897. See also R.T. Martin, Castorologia, a History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver (London, 1892).
(R. L.*)
[1] The word is descended from the Aryan name of the animal, cf. Sanskrit babhrús, brown, the great ichneumon, Lat. fiber, Ger. Biber, Swed. bafver, Russ. bobr’; the root bhru has given “brown,” and, through Romanic, “bronze” and “burnish.”
BEAVER (from Fr. bavière, a child’s bib, from bave, saliva), the lower part of the helmet, fixed to the neck-armour to protect the face and cheeks; properly it moved upwards, as the visor moved down, but the word is sometimes used to include the visor. The right form of the word, “baver,” has been altered from a confusion with “beaver,” a hat made of beaver-fur or a silk imitation, also, in slang, called a “castor,” from the zoological name of the beaver family.