And, accordingly, those people whose demand most urgently presses upon their power of supply, the Chinese, with their three hundred millions of ever craving appetites, have directly applied themselves to the art of promoting that great power of reproduction, that richest manufacture of nourishing food. On all the great rivers of China, prodigious multitudes find in the waters, the food which they would but vainly ask from the land. Agriculture is always more or less precarious; a blighting wind, a frost, the slightest accident, can sentence a whole nation to all the horrors of Famine. But, on the contrary, the living and teeming, the exulting and abounding, harvest beneath the waters, nourishes innumerable families, and makes those families almost as prolific and abounding as itself.
In May, on the great central river of the Empire, a vast trade is done in Fish fry, which is bought, sold, and resold, for the purpose of stocking the fish-ponds of private persons, who feed their fish from the mere offal of the household.
The Romans,—so long ago!—had the same wise system;—only they, sometimes, were barbarous enough to feed their fish with slaves! Bad enough, that, and to spare; but at least they left us the precious legacy of these words—"The spawn of the sea fish can become fish in fresh water." In the last century, a German, by the name of Jacobi, discovered, or rather, revived, the art of artificial fecundation; and, in our own century, and with still more productive effect, France, copying from England, has done the same thing. A fisherman of Bresse, Remy, has practised, since 1840, the art which has now become European.
Taken in hand by such men as Coste, Pouchet, &c., this art has ceased to be merely empirical—it has become a Science. Among other things, it has become known that there are certain regular connections between the salt and the fresh water; the fish from the former, coming, at certain seasons, to spawn in the latter. The Eel, wherever bred, as soon as it has the thickness of a needle, hastens to ascend the river, and in such numbers that it actually whitens the whole stream. This treasure, which, if properly taken care of, would give many thousands of pounds of the most nutritious food is unworthily, shamefully, destroyed; sold as so much mere manure. The Salmon is no less faithful; invariably it comes from the sea back to the river in which it had its birth. Mark hundreds of them, and not one of them shall be missing. Their love of their native river is such that they will even, (see the Salmon Leaps of Scotland, Ireland, and Northern England) leap, springing from the tail, over seemingly insurmountable obstacles! Such are the Fish!
Upon land, we take care of our Horses; why not PRESERVE THE SEA? Why not protect the breeding Season of the Ocean? The young and the pregnant females, should be held sacred, more especially as to those species which are not superabundantly productive, such as the Cetacæ, and the Amphibii. To kill, is a necessity of our nature, our teeth and stomach sufficiently testify to that; but that very necessity obliges us to preserve life.
On the land, we feed and protect our flocks and herds. But for the food and protection which we give to them, most of them would not exist at all, or would have been devoured by wild beasts. We have a right, or at least, a plausible excuse, for killing them, but we take care to spare the young and the pregnant.
In the seas there are still more young lives annihilated when we depart from this law of preserving that we may the more plentifully kill. We may, if we prudently as well as mercifully so will it, make the generation of the inferior animals, an element almost infinitely productive. In our seas and rivers, chiefly, it is, that Man appears the Magician. High time it surely is, that he should unite to his power both kindness and wisdom. He is in reality, the opponent of death; for, though appetite compels him to kill, his skill and care can create torrents of teeming life.
As regards those precious species which, foolishly, as well as cruelly, we have almost annihilated, and especially for that greatest and most precious life of all, the Whale, there should be an absolute peace, for at least half a century. That great, that really magnificent species, will then repair its losses. Being no longer persecuted, it will return to the temperate zone, which is its natural climate, where it will find its natural food in the abounding animalculæ of the comparatively warm waters. Being thus restored to its natural climate and its natural food, it will regain its old gigantic proportions. Let the old rendezvous of their Love be held sacred, and again we shall see the Leviathan, the whale of two or three hundred feet long. Let this magnificent creature's haunts be respected, especially in its breeding season, and in half a century it would be as plentiful as of old. Formerly it abounded in a bay of California. Why not make that bay sacred to it? Then it would not seek shelter among the horrid glaciers of the pole. Let us respect their reason of Love, and enormous will be the benefit to ourselves.
Peace! I say again; peace for the Whale, the Sea-Cow, the Sea-Elephant; peace for all those precious species which man's inhumanity has so nearly crushed out of existence. A long, a sacred peace should be granted to them; like that which the Swiss so wisely granted to the Chamois, which, when almost extinct, was thus rendered numerous as ever. For all, whether Fish or Amphibii there is needed a season of perfect rest, like the Truce of God, which in the olden day prevented the chivalry of Europe from butchering each other.
These creatures themselves instinctively comprehend what we either know not or neglect; for, at their season of maternity, they lose their timidity, and venture to our shores, as though certain that at such a season, they will be held sacred. At that season, they are in their greatest beauty a id their greatest strength. Their brilliant color and their flashing phosphorence indicate the utmost vigor of their existence, and in every species that is not menacingly superabundant, that season of reproduction should be respected. Kill them afterwards? By all means—but pray do not anticipatively kill in the one fish a whole shoal of fishes.