In honour of the animal whose industriousness led to the naming of this moon, here is a beaver, from about the turn of the twentieth century - yet beavers have been around for generations longer, from the time, even, before the continents were split asunder. We know this because there are beavers in America and Europe, including Asia, which come from the same root stock, but have evolved independent of each other in order to to suit their location. changing the colour and thickness of their fur, and even developing differently shaped skulls and jaws to suit the local trees, which they not only eat (along with other vegetation) but convert into their homes and surrounding landscapes, making huge networks of dams and lodges around rivers and waterways.
The Trading Card Database/beaver tells us that there are forty-four cards of beavers. The curious thing though is that whilst they list Abdul "Animals of the World" (1881) as the earliest of these cards, the same main part of the picture is used by Allen & Ginter in their "Quadrupeds" series, and that was not issued until 1890. And it does not appear to be an error of issuing date because the Abdul set actually says "Copyright 1881". I will do a bit more research on this over the coming days.
This set was issued by Stollwerck and it comes from group 5. It is also card 1. The entire set is a hundred and forty-four cards, twenty-four groups each of six cards. Our group translates as "Swimming and Diving Animals", and the cards in the set are
- Beaver
- Sealion
- Bittern
- Black Swan
- Kingfisher
- Auk
This is rather an odd group, four birds and two animals.
One of the first things you will notice is our card it calls the beaver "Le Castor" - which is a good time to mention that on European cards you will often find them called "Castor" - though this is actually their species or genus and it was given them by Carl Linnaeus in 1758.
The album titles the entire set as "Album du Regne Animal" - which I would have translated as "the album of the Animal Kingdom", but if you hunt hard enough you will discover that an album was printed for each of the Stollwerck territories, and the one for this set which was available in America and England was actually called "Animal World Album".
The other albums I have found so far are "Dierenrijk Album" (The Netherlands), "Tier Reich" (Germany), and "Samle Album Dier-rige" this being a very sought after one as it is in the Frisian language, only spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland, a few parts of Oldenburg in Germany, and along the coasts and islands of the northernmost parts of Germany.