Note 353 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 2)

The Beaver (Castor fiber). The account of the way “they draw the logg to the habitation appoynted” is a fanciful exaggeration, hardly less ridiculous than the preceding statement about the precaution the animal takes in winter to preserve his tail!

Cunny, mentioned in the first paragraph, is doubtless a seventeenth-century barbarism for cony, a name at this time commonly applied to the rabbit. The context, both here and in the account of the muskewashe, seems to imply this, although the word is correctly written cony in the paragraph relating to Hares. In some of the early accounts of Virginia, published in the first half of the seventeenth century, hares and cunnies are enumerated in the lists of animals, where the latter name evidently means cony or rabbit. Serat, in the same paragraph, is a term of much greater obscurity of application.