[105] According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, three thousand herring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in the transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most successfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the exportation of them altogether.—Das Leben des Meeres, p. 182.
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or enough to supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe.
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring too bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.—Dwight's Travels, ii, pp. 512, 515.
[106] The indiscriminate hostility of man to inferior forms of animated life is little creditable to modern civilization, and it is painful to reflect that it becomes keener and more unsparing in proportion to the refinement of the race. The savage slays no animal, not even the rattlesnake, wantonly; and the Turk, whom we call a barbarian, treats the dumb beast as gently as a child. One cannot live many weeks in Turkey without witnessing touching instances of the kindness of the people to the lower animals, and I have found it very difficult to induce even the boys to catch lizards and other reptiles for preservation as specimens. See Appendix, [No. 19].
The fearless confidence in man, so generally manifested by wild animals in newly discovered islands, ought to have inspired a gentler treatment of them; but a very few years of the relentless pursuit, to which they are immediately subjected, suffice to make them as timid as the wildest inhabitants of the European forest. This timidity, however, may easily be overcome. The squirrels introduced by Mayor Smith into the public parks of Boston are so tame as to feed from the hands of passengers, and they not unfrequently enter the neighboring houses.
[107] A fact mentioned by Schubert—and which in its causes and many of its results corresponds almost precisely with those connected with the escape of Barton Pond in Vermont, so well known to geological students—is important, as showing that the diminution of the fish in rivers exposed to inundations is chiefly to be ascribed to the mechanical action of the current, and not mainly, as some have supposed, to changes of temperature occasioned by clearing. Our author states that, in 1796, a terrible inundation was produced in the Indalself, which rises in the Storsjö in Jemtland, by drawing off into it the waters of another lake near Ragunda. The flood destroyed houses and fields; much earth was swept into the channel, and the water made turbid and muddy; the salmon and the smaller fish forsook the river altogether, and never returned. The banks of the river have never regained their former solidity, and portions of their soil are still continually falling into the water.—Resa genom Sverge, ii, p. 51.
[108] Wittwer, Physikalische Geographie, p. 142.
[109] To vary the phrase, I make occasional use of animalcule, which, as a popular designation, embraces all microscopic organisms. The name is founded on the now exploded supposition that all of them are animated, which was the general belief of naturalists when attention was first drawn to them. It was soon discovered that many of them were unquestionably vegetable, and there are numerous genera the true classification of which is matter of dispute among the ablest observers. There are cases in which objects formerly taken for living animalcules turn out to be products of the decomposition of matter once animated, and it is admitted that neither spontaneous motion nor even apparent irritability are sure signs of animal life.
[110] See an interesting report on the coral fishery, by Sant' Agabio, Italian Consul-General at Algiers, in the Bollettino Consolare, published by the Department of Foreign Affairs, 1862, pp. 139, 151, and in the Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, No. ii, pp. 360, 373.