It’s a fine day to revisit Henry Morgan. And some of my favorite beaver illustrations ever made.

Michigan’s Industrious Beavers

Lewis Henry Morgan

Morgan was to become a famous man, born in New York State in November 1818. He served as a lawmaker in New York’s State Assembly and State Senate. His fame would arise from his work as an anthropologist and developer of social theory who influenced the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In pursuit of Michigan’s beautiful brook trout, Morgan became interested in the activities of beavers. He studied them intently for several years before producing his captivating 1868 natural history volume, “The American Beaver and His Works,” a book still available in reprint.

Fascination With Beavers

Irene Cheng, in a 2006 piece in Cabinet Magazine, said compared to Charles Darwin’s precise bees, with their mathematically perfect hives, Morgan’s beavers appeared “downright brute-like and their dams primitive.”

“Yet what Morgan admired about the beavers’ works was not the final form so much as the process of reasoning that allowed the animal architect to adapt its constructions intelligently,” Cheng wrote. “Unlike the bees, Morgan’s mutes built not out of base need, or driven by a ‘struggle for existence,’ but to further their own well-being and happiness. He believed that the beaver had a fundamental awareness of its own creation.”

I will never not love seeing this illustration.