ONE strange feature of this sea life of the tropics is the regular recurrence of migratory swarms of fish of very small size that return in huge numbers year after year with such absolute regularity that the natives calculate on the event on a certain date in each year and even within an hour or two of the day, says a writer in Lippincott's Magazine. One such swarm of fish forms the occasion of an annual holiday and feast at Samoa. The fish is not unlike the whitebait for which the English Thames has so long been celebrated and each year it arrives in Samoa on the same day in the month of October, remains for a day, or at the most two days and then disappears entirely until the same day the following year. Why it comes, or whence, no curious naturalist has yet discovered, nor has anybody traced its onward course when it leaves the Samoan group, but the fact is unquestionable that suddenly, without notice, the still waters of the lagoon which surround each island within the fringing reef become alive with millions of fishes, passing through them for a single day and night and then disappearing for a year as though they had never come.
A visit to Samoa enabled me to see this strange phenomenon for myself and to witness the native feast by which it is celebrated year by year. I had been in Samoa for a month and in that month I had enjoyed almost a surfeit of beauty. I had coasted the shores of its islands, I had bathed in the warm, still waters of its lagoons, fringed to seaward by the white reef, on which the ocean broke in golden spray, and to landward by the silver beach of coral sand, flecked with the tremulous shadows of the swaying palms. I had climbed with my native guide the abrupt hills, covered with dense forests of tropical luxuriance, through the arcades of which I caught glimpses of the flash and luster of the ocean's myriad smiles, and again we had plunged into deep valleys among the hills, where little headlong streams murmur under the shade of the widespreading bread-fruit trees and wave the broad leaves of the great water lilies of the Pacific coast islands. This visit of the fishes came as a climax of wonders.
SILLIEST BIRD IN THE WORLD.
DODO is the Portuguese name for simpleton, and it is given to the silliest bird that ever lived.
Three hundred years ago, when the Portuguese first visited the Island of Mauritius, they found a great number of these birds. They were about the size of a large swan, blackish gray in color and having only a bunch of feathers in place of a tail, and little, useless wings. More stupid and foolish birds could not be imagined. They ran about making a silly, hissing noise like a goose, and the sailors easily knocked them over with their paddles. They couldn't fly, they couldn't swim, they couldn't run at any great speed, and as for fighting, they were the greatest cowards in the world. They were much too stupid to build a nest, and so they dropped an egg in the grass and went off and let it hatch as best it could. Added to all these things its flesh was fairly good to eat, and the Portuguese pursued it so steadily for food that in less than a century's time there wasn't a single dodo left in the world. It was quite too silly and stupid to save its own life, and so it became extinct.