The greatest admirers of the beaver are those who know him best. He bears acquaintance. This cannot be had by merely looking at the animal, nor by sympathetically studying his monumental works. These works will of course impress one, but they give one at best only a traveler's impression. Long and repeated visits to the colony in its busy season appear to be the best way to get at the character of the beaver. The cubical contents of a dam may not even suggest the obstacles overcome in its construction, the labor of getting the material, the dangers avoided, the numerous unexpected difficulties overcome. Five cords of green poles and limbs in a neat pile in the pond by the beaver house may tell that the harvest has been gathered, but it does not tell that a part of this harvest may have been gathered a mile away and skillfully transported to the house with difficulty and amid dangers. A part of the food-pile may have been dragged laboriously uphill and along trails which required months of labor to open; or numerous pieces in this pile may have been floated through a canal of such magnitude that a generation was required to construct it. Altogether, harvest-gathering is interesting and heroic work on the part of the beaver. In doing it he takes large risks, for the harvest is usually gathered far from the house and on the dangerous beaver frontier. For more than a quarter of a century I have been a friendly visitor to his colonies, in which I have lingered long and lovingly. That he makes mistakes is certain, but that he is an intelligent, reasoning animal I have long firmly believed. As I said in "Wild Life on the Rockies,"--"I have so often seen him change his plans so wisely and meet emergencies so promptly and well that I can think of him only as a reasoner." As evidence that he sometimes reasons, it may be cited that he occasionally endeavors to fell trees in a given direction; that he often avoids cutting those entangled at the top; that sometimes he will, on a windy day, fell trees on the leeward side of a grove; that he commonly avoids felling trees in the heart of a grove, but cuts on the outskirts of it. He occasionally dams a stream, digs a canal, leads water to a dry place, and there forms and fills a reservoir and establishes a home. Often his house is built by a spring and thus the danger from thick ice avoided. These are some of the reasons for my believing him to be intelligent. Morgan speaks of the beaver as "endowed with a mental principle which performs for him the same office that the human mind does for man," and says, "The works of the beaver afford many interesting illustrations of his intelligence and reasoning capacity," also, "In the capacity thereby displayed of adapting their works to the ever-varying circumstances in which they find themselves placed instead of following blindly an invariable type, some evidence of possession on their part of _free intelligence_ is undoubtedly furnished."