The introduction and successful breeding of fish or foreign species

appears to have been long practised in China, and was not unknown to the

Greeks and Romans. [Footnote: The observations of COLUMELLA, de Re

Rustica, lib. viii., sixteenth and following chapters, on fish-breeding,

are interesting. The Romans not only stocked natural but constructed

artificial ponds, of both fresh and salt water, and cut off bays of the

sea for this purpose. They also naturalized various species of sea-fish

in fresh water.] This art has been revived in modern times, but thus far

without any important results, economical or physical, though there

seems to be good reason to believe it may be employed with advantage on

an extended scale. As in the case of plants, man has sometimes

undesignedly introduced now species of aquatic animals into countries

distant from their birthplace. The accidental escape of the Chinese

goldfish from ponds where they were bred as a garden ornament, has

peopled some European, and it is said American streams with this

species. Canals of navigation and irrigation interchange the fish of

lakes and rivers widely separated by natural barriers, as well as the

plants which drop their seeds into the waters. The Erie Canal, as

measured by its own channel, has a length of about three hundred and

sixty miles, and it has ascending and descending locks in both

directions. By this route, the fresh-water fish of the Hudson and the

Upper Lakes, and some of the indigenous vegetables of these respective

basins, have intermixed, and the fauna and flora of the two regions have

now more species common to both than before the canal was opened.

[Footnote: The opening or rather the reconstruction of the Claudian

emissary by Prince Torlonia, designed to drain the Lake Fucinus, or

Celano, has introduced the fish of that lake into the Liri or Garigliano

which received the discharge from the lake.--Dorotea, Sommario storico

dell' Alieutica, p. 60.]The opening of the Suez Canal will, no doubt,

produce very interesting revolutions in the animal and vegetable

population of both basins. The Mediterranean, with some local

exceptions--such as the bays of Calabria, and the coast of Sicily so

picturesquely described by Quatrefages [Footnote: Souvenire d'un

Naturaliste, i., pp. 204 et seqq.]-is comparatively poor in marine

vegetation, and in shell as well as in fin fish. The scarcity of fish in

some of its gulfs is proverbial, and you may scrutinize long stretches

of beach on its northern shores, after every south wind for a whole

winter, without finding a dozen shells to reward your search. But no one

who has not looked down into tropical or subtropical seas can conceive

the amazing wealth of the Red Sea in organic life. Its bottom is

carpeted or paved with marine plants, with zoophytes and with shells,

while its waters are teeming with infinitely varied forms of moving

life. Most of its vegetables and its animals, no doubt, are confined by

the laws of their organization to a warmer temperature than that of the

Mediterranean, but among them there must be many whose habitat is of a

wider range, many whose powers of accommodation would enable them to

acclimate themselves in a colder sea.

We may suppose the less numerous aquatic fauna and flora of the

Mediterranean to be equally capable of climatic adaptation, and hence

there will be a partial interchange of the organic population not

already common to both seas. Destructive species, thus newly introduced,

may diminish the numbers of their proper prey in either basin, and, on

the other hand, the increased supply of appropriate food may greatly

multiply the abundance of others, and at the same time add important

contributions to the aliment of man in the countries bordering on the

Mediterranean. [Footnote: The dissolution of the salts in the bed of the

Bitter Lake impregnated the water admitted from the Red Sea so highly

that for some time fish were not seen in that basin. The flow of the

current through the canal has now reduced the proportion of saline

matter to five per cent, and late travellers speak of fish as abundant

in its waters.]

Some accidental attraction not unfrequently induces fish to follow a

vessel for days in succession, and they may thus be enticed into zones

very distant from their native habitat. Several years ago, I was told at

Constantinople, upon good authority, that a couple of fish, of a species

wholly unknown to the natives had just been taken in the Bosphorus. They

were alleged to have followed an English ship from the Thames, and to

have been frequently observed by the crew during the passage; but I was

unable to learn their specific character. [Footnote: Seven or eight

years ago, the Italian government imported from France a dredging

machine for use in the harbor of La Spezia. The dredge brought attached

to its hull a shell-fish not known in Italian waters. The mollusk,

finding the local circumstances favorable, established itself in this

new habitat, multiplied rapidly, and is now found almost everywhere on

the west coast of the Peninsula.] Many of the fish which pass the

greater part of the year in salt water spawn in fresh, and some

fresh-water species, the common brook-trout of New England for instance,

which under ordinary circumstances never visit the sea, will, if

transferred to brooks emptying directly into the ocean, go down into the

salt water after spawning-time, and return again the next season. Some

sea fish have been naturalized in fresh water, and naturalists have

argued from the character of the fish of Lake Baikal, and especially

from the existence of the seal in that locality, that all its

inhabitants were originally marine species, and have changed their

habits with the gradual conversion of the saline waters of the

lake-once, as is assumed, a maritime bay-into fresh. [Footnote: Babinet,

Etudes et Lectures, ii, pp. 108,110.] The presence of the seal is hardly

conclusive on this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Champlain at

the distance of some hundreds of miles from even brackish water. One of

these animals was killed on the ice in that lake in February, 1810,

another in February, 1846, [Footnote: Thompson, Natural History of

Vermont, p. 38, and Appendix, p. 18. There is no reason to believe that

the seal breeds in Lake Champlain, but the individual last taken there

must have been some weeks, at least, in its waters. It was killed on the

ice in the widest part of the lake, on the 23d of February, thirteen

days after the surface was entirely frozen, except the usual small

cracks, and a month or two after the ice closed at all points north of

the place where the seal was found.] and remains of the seal have been

found at other times in the same waters.

The intentional naturalization of foreign fish, as I have said, has not

thus far yielded important fruits; but though this particular branch of

what is called, not very happily, pisciculture, has not yet established

its claims to the attention of the physical geographer or the political

economist, the artificial breeding of domestic fish, of the lobster and

other crustacea, has already produced very valuable results, and is

apparently destined to occupy an extremely conspicuous place in the

history of man's efforts to compensate his prodigal waste of the gifts

of nature. The arrangements for breeding fish in the Venetian lagoon of

Comacchio date far back in the Middle Ages, but the example does not

seem to have been followed elsewhere in Europe at that period, except in

small ponds where the propagation of the fish was left to nature without

much artificial aid. The transplantation of oysters to artificial ponds

has long been common, and it appears to have recently succeeded well on

a large scale in the open sea on the French coast. A great extension of

this fishery is hoped for, and it is now proposed to introduce upon the

same coast the American soft clam, which is so abundant in the

tide-washed beach sands of Long Island Sound as to form an important

article in the diet of the neighboring population. Experimental

pisciculture has been highly successful in the United States, and will

probably soon become a regular branch of rural industry, especially as

Congress, at the session of 1871-2, made liberal provision for its

promotion.

The restoration of the primitive abundance of salt and fresh water fish,

is perhaps the greatest material benefit that, with our present physical

resources, governments can hope to confer upon their subjects. The

rivers, lakes, and seacoasts once restocked, and protected by law from

exhaustion by taking fish at improper seasons, by destructive methods,

and in extravagant quantities, would continue indefinitely to furnish a

very large supply of most healthful food, which, unlike all domestic and

agricultural products, would spontaneously renew itself and cost nothing

but the taking. There are many sterile or wornout soils in Europe so

situated that they might, at no very formidable cost, be converted into

permanent lakes, which would serve not only as reservoirs to retain the

water of winter rains and snow, and give it out in the dry season for

irrigation, but as breeding ponds for fish, and would thus, without

further cost, yield a larger supply of human food than can at present be

obtained from them even at a great expenditure of capital and labor in

agricultural operations. [Footnote: See Ackerhof, Die Nutzung der Seiche

und Gewasser. Quedlinburg, 1860.] The additions which might be made to

the nutriment of the civilized world by a judicious administration of

the resources of the waters, would allow some restriction of the amount

of soil at present employed for agricultural purposes, and a

corresponding extension of the area of the forest, and would thus

facilitate a return to primitive geographical arrangements which it is

important partially to restore.

Destruction of Fish.

The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure from human

pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of their retreats, and by

our ignorance of their habits--a natural result of the difficulty of

observing the ways of creatures living in a medium in which we cannot

exist. Human agency has, nevertheless, both directly and incidentally,

produced great changes in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the

rivers, and if the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are

apparently of small importance in general geography, they are still not

wholly inappreciable. The great diminution in the abundance of the

larger fish employed for food or pursued for products useful in the arts

is familiar, and when we consider how the vegetable and animal life on

which they feed must be effected by the reduction of their numbers, it

is easy to see that their destruction may involve considerable

modifications in many of the material arrangements of nature. The

whale [Footnote: I use WHALE not in a technical sense, but as a generic

term for all the large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under

that name. The Greek kaetos and Latin Balaena, though sometimes,

especially in later classical writers, specifically applied to true

cetaceans, were generally much more comprehensive in their signification

than the modern word whale. This appears abundantly from the enumeration

of the marine animals embraced by Oppian under the name <Greek: kaetos>,

in the first book of the Halieutica.

There is some confusion in Oppian's account of the fishery of the

<Greek: kaetos> in the fifth book of the Halieutica. Part of it is

probably to be understood of cetaceans which have GROUNDED, as some

species often do; but in general it evidently applies to the taking of

large fish--sharks, for example, as appear by the description of the

teeth--with hook and bait.] does not appear to have been an object of

pursuit by the ancients, for any purpose, nor do we know when the whale

fishery first commenced. It was, however, very actively prosecuted in

the Middle Ages, and the Biscayans seem to have been particularly

successful in this as indeed in other branches of nautical

industry. [Footnote: From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King

Alfred into his translation of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen

pursued the whale fishery in the ninth century, and it appears, both

from the poem called The Whale, in the Codex Exoniensis, and from the

dialogue with the fisherman in the Colloquies of Aelfric, that the

Anglo-Saxons followed this dangerous chore at a period not much later. I

am not aware of any evidence to show that any of the Latin nationals

engaged in this fishery until a century or two afterward, though it may

not be easy to disprove their earlier participation in it. In mediaeval

literature, Latin and Romance, very frequent mention is made of a

species of vessel called in Latin baleneria, balenerium, balenerius,

balaneria, etc.; in Catalan, balener; in French, balenier; all of which

words occur the many other forms. The most obvious etymology of these

words would suggest the meaning, whaler, baleinier; but some have

supposed that the name was descriptive of the great size of the ships,

and others have referred it to a different root. From the fourteenth

century, the word occurs oftener, perhaps, in old Catalan, than in any

other language; but Capmany does not notice the whale fishery as one of

the maritime pursuits of the very enterprising Catalan people, nor do I

find any of the products of the whale mentioned in the old Catalan

tariffs. The WHALEBONE of the mediaeval writers, which is described as

very white, is doubtless the ivory of the walrus or of the narwhale.]

Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every sea. They long since

became so rare in the Mediterranean as not to afford encouragement for

the fishery as a regular occupation; and the great demand for oil and

whalebone for mechanical and manufacturing purposes, in the present

century, has stimulated the pursuit of the "hugest of living creatures"

to such activity, that he has now almost wholly disappeared from many

favorite fishing grounds, and in others is greatly diminished in

numbers.

What special functions, besides his uses to man, are assigned to the

whale in the economy of nature, wo do not know; but some considerations,

suggested by the character of the food upon which certain species

subsist, deserve to be specially noticed. None of the great mammals

grouped under the general name of whale are rapacious. They all live

upon small organisms, and the most numerous species feed almost wholly

upon thesoft gelatinous mollusks in which the sea abounds in all

latitudes. We cannot calculate even approximately the number of the

whales, or the quantity of organic nutriment consumed by an individual,

and of course we can form no estimate of the total amount of animal

matter withdrawn by them, in a given period, from the waters of the sea.

It is certain, however, that it must have been enormous when they were

more abundant, and that it is still very considerable. In 1846 the

United States had six hundred and seventy-eight whaling ships chiefly

employed in the Pacific, and the product of the American whale fishery

for the year ending June 1st, 1860, was seven millions and a half of

dollars. [Footnote: In consequence of the great scarcity of the whale,

the use of coal-gas for illumination, the substitution of other fatty

and oleaginous substances, such as lard, palm-oil, and petroleum for

right-whale oil and spermaceti, the whale fishery has rapidly fallen off

within a few years. The great supply of petroleum, which is much used

for lubricating machinery as well as for numerous other purposes, has

produced a more perceptible effect on the whale fishery than any other

single circumstance. According to Bigelow, Les Etats-Unis en 1863, p.

346, the American whaling fleet was diminished by 29 in 1858, 57 in

1860, 94 in 1861, and 65 in 1862. The number of American ships employed

in that fishery in 1862 was 353. In 1868, the American whaling fleet was

reduced to 223. The product of the whale fishery in that year was

1,485,000 gallons of sperm oil, 2,065,612 gallons of train oil, and

901,000 pounds of whalebone. The yield of the two species of whale is

about the same, being estimated at from 4,000 to 5,000 gallons for each

fish. Taking the average at 4,500 gallons, the American whalers must

have captured 789 whales, besides, doubtless, many which were killed or

mortally wounded and not secured. The returns for the year are valued at

about five million and a half dollars. Mr. Cutts, from a report by whom

most of the above facts are taken, estimates the annual value of the

"products of the sea" at $90,000,000.

According to the New Bedford Standard, the American whalers numbered

722, measuring 230,218 tons, in 1846. On the 31st December, 1872, the

number was reduced to 204, with a tonnage of 47,787 tons, and the

importation of whale and sperm oil amounted in that year to 79,000

barrels. Svend Foyn, an energetic Norwegian, now carries on the whale

fishery in the Arctic Ocean in a steamer of 20 horse-power, accompanied

by freight-ships for the oil. The whales are killed by explosive shells

fired from a small cannon. The number usually killed by Foyn is from 35

to 45 per year.--The Commerce in the Products of the Sea, a report by

Col. R. D. Cutts, communicated to the U. S. Senate. Washington, 1872.]

The mere bulk of the whales destroyed in a single year by the American

and the European vessels engaged in this fishery would form an island of

no inconsiderable dimensions, and each one of those taken must have

consumed, in the course of his growth, many times his own weight of

mollusks. The destruction of the whales must have been followed by a

proportional increase of the organisms they feed upon, and if we had the

means of comparing the statistics of these humble forms of life, for

even so short a period as that between the years 1760 and 1860, we

should find a difference possibly sufficient to suggest an explanation

of some phenomena at present unaccounted for. For instance, as I have

observed in another work, [Footnote: The Origin and History of the

English Language, &c., pp. 423, 424.] the phosphorescence of the sea was

unknown to ancient writers, or at least scarcely noticed by them, and

even Homer--who, blind as tradition makes him when he composed his

epics, had seen, and marked, in earlier life, all that the glorious

nature of the Mediterranean and its coasts discloses to unscientific

observation--nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and striking of

maritime wonders. In the passage just referred to, I have endeavored to

explain the silence of ancient writers with respect to this as well as

other remarkable phenomena on psychological grounds; but is it not

possible that, in modern times, the animalculae which produce it may

have immensely multiplied, from the destruction of their natural enemies

by man, and hence that the gleam shot forth by their decomposition, or

by their living processes, is both more frequent and more brilliant than

in the days of classic antiquity?

Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures resembling

himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are extremely voracious, and

almost every tribe devours unsparingly the feebler species, and even the

spawn and young of its own. [Footnote: Two young pickerel, Gystes

fasciatus, five inches long, ate 128 minnows, an inch long, the first

day they were fed, 132 the second, and 150 the third.--Fifth Report of

Commissioners of Massachusetts for Introduction of Fish. 1871. p. 17.]

The enormous destruction of the shark [Footnote: The shark is pursued in

all the tropical and subtropical seas for its fins--for which there is a

great demand in China as an article of diet--its oil and other products.

About 40,000 are taken annually in the Indian Ocean and the contiguous

seas. In the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean large numbers are annually

caught. See MERK. Waarenlexikon--a work of great accuracy and value

(Leipzig, 1870), article Haifisch.] the pike, the trout family, and

other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing birds, the seal, and the

otter, by man, would naturally have occasioned a great increase in the

weaker and more defenceless fish on which they feed, had he not been as

hostile to them also as to their persecutors.

Destruction of Aquatic Animals.

It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his

enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish, but

he has already exterminated at least one marine warm-blooded

animal--Steller's sea cow--and the walrus, the sea lion, and other large

amphibia, as well as the principal fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent

danger of extinction. Steller's sea cow, Rhytina Stelleri, was first

seen by Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering's Island. It was a huge

amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight thousand pounds, and

appears to have been confined exclusively to the islands and coasts in

the neighborhood of Bering's Strait. Its flesh was very palatable, and

the localities it frequented were easily accessible from the Russian

establishments in Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character,

and the abundance of fur animals in the same waters, were made known to

the occupants of those posts by the return of the survivors of Bering's

expedition, so active a chase was commenced against the amphibia of that

region, that, in the course of twenty-seven years, the sea cow,

described by Steller as extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have

been completely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen

since the year 1768. The various tribes of seals [Footnote: The most

valuable variety of fur seal, formerly abundant in all cold latitudes,

is stated to have been completely exterminated in the Southern

hemisphere, and to be now found only on one or two small islands of the

Aleutian group. In 1867 more than 700,000 seal skins were imported into

Great Britain, and at least 600,000 seals are estimated to have been

taken in 1870. These numbers do not include the seals killed by the

Esquimaux and other rude tribes.] in the Northern and Southern Pacific,

the walrus [Footnote: In 1868, a few American ships engaged in the North

Pacific whale fishery turned their attention to the walrus, and took

from 200 to 600 each. In 1869 other whalers engaged in the same pursuit,

and in 1870 the American fleet is believed to have destroyed not less

than fifty thousand of these animals. They yield about twenty gallons of

oil and four or five pounds of ivory each.] and the sea otter, are

already so reduced in numbers that they seem destined soon to follow the

sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent enough, and a police

energetic enough, to repress the ardent cupidity of their pursuers. The

seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which feed almost

exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and of course their

destruction or numerical reduction must have favored the multiplication

of the species of fish principally preyed upon by them. I have been

assured by the keeper of several young seals that, if supplied at

frequent intervals, each seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds

of fish, or about a quarter of his own weight, in a day. A very

intelligent and observing hunter, who has passed a great part of his

life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the

fresh-water otter of the North American States, estimates their

consumption of fish at about four pounds per day. Man has promoted the

multiplication of fish by making war on their brute enemies, but he has

by no means thereby compensated his own greater destructiveness.

[Footnote: 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 almost

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. The London Times of May 11, 1872, informs us that 1,100 tons of

mackerel estimated to weigh one pound each had recently been taken in a

single night at a fishing station on the British coast.

About ten million eels are sold annually in Billingsgate market, but

vastly greater numbers of the young fry, when but three or four inches

long, are taken. So abundant are they at the mouths of many French and

English rivers, that they are carried into the country by cart-loads,

and not only eaten, but given to swine or used as manure.] The bird and

beast of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as

they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are limited by the

demands of present appetite, and they do not wastefully destroy what

they cannot consume. Man, on the contrary, angles to-day that he may

dine to-morrow; he takes and dries millions of fish on the banks of

Newfoundland and the coast of Norway, that the fervent Catholic of the

shores of the Mediterranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings

of the stomach during next year's Lent, without violating the discipline

of the papal church; [Footnote: The fisheries of Sicily alone are said to

yield 20,000 tons of tunny a year. The tunny is principally consumed in

Italy during Lent, and a large proportion of the twenty millions of

codfish taken annually at the Lofoden fishery on the coast of Norway is

exported to the Mediterranean.] and all the arrangements of his

fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of many more

fish than are secured for human use, and the loss of a large proportion

of the annual harvest of the sea in the process of curing, or in

transportation to the places of its consumption. [Footnote According to

Berthelote, in the Gulf of Lyons, between Marseilles and the easternmost

spur of the Pyrenees, about 5,000,000 small fish ate taken annually with

the drag-net, and not lees than twice as many more, not to spekak of

spawn, are destroyed by the use of this act.

Between 1861 and 1865 France imported from Norway, for use as bait in

the Sardine fishery, cod-roes to the value of three million

francs.--Cutts, Report on Commerce in the Products of the Sea, 1872, p.

82.

The most reckless waste of aquatic life I remember to have seen noticed,

if we except the destruction of herring and other fish with upawn, is

that of the eggs of the turtle in the Amazon for the sake of the oil

extracted from then. Bates estimates the eggs thus annually sacrificed

at 48,000,000.-Naturalits inthe Amazon, 2d edition, 1864, p. 805.] Fish

are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even imperceptible

differences in their breeding places and feeding grounds. Every river,

every brook, every lake stamps a special character upon its salmon, its

shad, and its trout, which is at once recognized by those who deal in or

consume them. No skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and

prepared by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the table of

nature, and the trout of the artificial pouds in Germany and Switzerland

are so inferior to the brook-fish of the same species and climate, that

it is hard to believe them identical. The superior sapidity of the

American trout and other fresh-water fishes to the most nearly

corresponding European species, which is familiar to every one

acquainted with both continents, is probably due less to specific

difference than to the fact that, even in the parts of the New World

which have been longest cultivated, wild nature is not yet tamed down to

the character it has assumed in the Old, and which it will acquire in

America also when her civilization shall be as ancient as is now that of

Europe. [Footnote: It is possible that time may modify the habits of the

fresh-water fish the North American States, and accommodate them to the

new physical conditions of their native waters. Hence it may be hoped

that nature, even unaided by art, will do something towards restoring

the ancient plenty of our lakes and rivers. The decrease of our

fresh-water fish cannot be alone to exhaustion by fishing, for in the

waters of the valleys and flanks of the Alps, which have been inhabited

and fished ten times as long by a denser population, fish are still very

abundant, and they thrive and multiply under circumstances where no

American species could live at all. On the southern slope of those

mountains, trout are caught in great numbers, in the swift streams which

rush from the glaciers, and where the water is of icy coldness, and so

turbid with particles of fine-ground rock, that you cannot see an inch

below the surface. The glacier streams of Switzerland, however, are less

abundant in fish.]

Man has hitherto hardly anywhere produced such climatic or other changes

as would suffice of themselves totally to banish the wild inhabitants of

the dry land, and thedisappearance of the native birds and quadrupeds

from particular localities is to be ascribed quite as much to his direct

persecutions as to the want of forest shelter, of appropriate food, or

of other conditions indispensable to their existence. But almost all the

processes of agriculture, and of mechanical and chemical industry, are

fatally destructive to aquatic animals within reach of their influence.

When, in consequence of clearing the woods, the changes already

described as thereby produced in the beds and currents of rivers, are in

progress, the spawning grounds of fish, are exposed from year to year to

a succession of mechanical disturbances; the temperature of the water is

higher in summer, colder in winter, than when it was shaded and

protected by wood; the smaller organisms, which formed the sustenance of

the young fry, disappear or are reduced in numbers, and new enemies are

added to the old foes that preyed upon them; the increased turbidness of

the water in the annual inundations chokes the fish; and, finally, the

quickened velocity of its current sweeps them down into the larger

rivers or into the sea, before they are yet strong enough to support so

great a change of circumstances. [Footnote: 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 Storsjo 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 and destroying its purity.--Resa

genom Sverge, ii, p. 61.] Industrial operations are not less destructive

to fish which live or spawn in fresh water. Mill-dams impede their

migrations, if they do not absolutely prevent them, the sawdust from

lumber mills clogs their gills, and the thousand deleterious mineral

substances, discharged into rivers from metallurgical, chemical, and

manufacturing establishments, poison them by shoals. [Footnote: The

mineral water discharged from a colliery on the river Doon in Scotland

discolored the stones in the bed of the river, and killed the fish for

twenty miles below. The fish of the streams in which hemp is macerated

in Italy are often poisoned by the juices thus extracted from the

plant.-Dorotea, Sommario della storia dell' Alieutica, pp. 64, 65.] We

have little evidence that any fish employed as human food has naturally

multiplied in modern times, while all the more valuable tribes have been

immensely reduced in numbers. This reduction must have affected the more

voracious species not used as food by man, and accordingly the shark,

and other fish of similar habits, even when not objects of systematic

pursuit, are now comparatively rare in many waters where they formerly

abounded. The result is, that man has greatly reduced thenumbers of all

larger marine animals, and consequently indirectly favored the

multiplication of the smaller aquatic organisms which entered into their

nutriment. This change in the relations of the organic and inorganic

matter of the sea must have excercised an influence on the latter. What

that influence has been we cannot say, still less can we predict what it

will be hereafter; but its action is not for that reason the less

certain. [Footnote: Among the unexpected results of human action, the

destruction or multiplication of fish, as well as of other animals, is a

not unfrequent occurrence. Footnote: Williams, in his History of

Vermont, i., p. 140, records such a case of the increase of trout. In a

pond formed by damming a small stream to obtain water power for a

sawmill, and covering one thousand acres of primitive forest, the

increased supply of food brought within reach of the fish multiplied

them to that degree, that, at the head of the pond, where, in the

spring, they crowded together in the brook which supplied it, they were

taken by the hands at pleasure, and swine caught them without

difficulty. A single sweep of a small scoopnet would bring up half a

bushel, carts were filled with them as fast as if picked up on dry land,

and in the fishing season they were commonly sold at a shilling

(eightpence halfpenny, or about seventeen cents) a bushel. The increase

in the size of the trout was as remarkable as the multiplication of

their numbers.

The construction of dams and mills is destructive to many fish, but

operates as a protection to their prey. The mills on Connecticut River

greatly diminished the number of the salmon, but the striped bass, on

which the salmon feeds, multiplied in proportion.--Dr. Dwight, Travels,

vol. ii., p. 323.]

Geographical Importance of Birds.

Wild birds form of themselves a very conspicuous and interesting feature

in the staffage, as painters call it, of the natural landscape, and they

are important elements in the view we are taking of geography, whether

we consider their immediate or their incidental influence. Birds affect

vegetation directly by sowing seeds and by consuming them; they affect

it indirectly by destroying insects injurious, or, in some cases,

beneficial to vegetable life. Hence, when we kill a seed-sowing bird, we

check the dissemination of a plant; when we kill a bird which digests

the seed it swallows, we promote the increase of a vegetable. Nature

protects the seeds of wild, much more effectually than those of

domesticated plants. The cereal grains are completely digested when

consumed by birds, but the germ of the smaller stone fruits and of very

many other wild vegetables is uninjured, perhaps even stimulated to more

vigorous growth, by the natural chemistry of the bird's stomach. The

power of flight and the restless habits of the bird enable it to

transport heavy seeds to far greater distances than they could be

carried by the wind. A swift-winged bird may drop cherry stones a

thousand miles from the tree they grow on; a hawk, in tearing a pigeon,

may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it had swallowed at a

distance of ten degrees of latitude, and thus the occurrence of isolated

plants in situations where their presence cannot otherwise well be

explained, is easily accounted for. [Footnote: Pigeons were shot near

Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green rice in their crops,

which it was thought must have been growing, a very few hours before, at

the distance of seven or eight hundred miles. The efforts of the Dutch

to confine the cultivation of the nutmeg to the island of Banda are said

to have been defeated by the birds, which transported this heavy fruit

to other islands.] There is a large class of seeds apparently specially

fitted by nature for dissemination by animals. I refer to those which

attach themselves, by means of hooks, or by viscous juices, to the coats

of quadrupeds and the feathers of birds, and are thus transported

wherever their living vehicles may chance to wander. Some birds, too,

deliberately bury seeds in the earth, or in holes excavated by them in

the bark of trees, not indeed with a foresight aiming directly at the

propagation of the plant, but from apparently purposeless secretiveness,

or as a mode of preserving food for future use.

The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural life than the

quadrupeds, and, in their relations to the economy of nature, they are

of very much less moment than four-footed animals, or than the

undomesticated birds. The domestic turkey [Footnote: The wild turkey

takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of very

considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the

former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman

who was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once

counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a

distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at

most in pairs, after swimming over from the Kentucky side.] is probably

more numerous in the territory of the United States than the wild bird

of the same species ever was, and the grouse cannot, at the period of

their greatest abundance, have counted as many as we now number of the

common hen. The dove, however, must fall greatly short of the wild

pigeon in multitude, and it is hardly probable that the flocks of

domestic geese and ducks are as numerous as once wore those of their

wild congeners. The pigeon, indeed, seems to have multiplied immensely,

for some years after the first clearings in the woods, because the

settlers warred unsparingly upon the hawk, while the crops of grain and

other vegetable growths increased the supply of food within the reach of

the young birds, at the age when their power of flight is not yet great

enough to enable them to seek it over a wide area. [Footnote: The

wood-pigeon, as well as the domestic dove, has been observed to increase

in numbers in Europe also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the

hawk. The American pigeons, which migrated in flocks so numerous that

they were whole days in passing a given point, were no doubt injurious

to the grain, but probably less so than is generally supposed; for they

did not confine themselves exclusively to the harvests for their

nourishment. ] The pigeon is not described by the earliest white

inhabitants of the American States as filling the air with such clouds

of winged life as astonished naturalists in the descriptions of Audubon,

and, at the present day, the net and the gun have so reduced its

abundance, that its appearance in large numbers is recorded only at long

intervals, and it is never seen in the great flocks remembered by many

still living observers as formerly very common.

INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS.

Man has undesignedly introduced into now districts perhaps fewer species

of birds than of quadrupeds; [Footnote: The first mention I have found

of the naturalization of a wild bird in modern Europe is in the

Menagiana, vol. iii., p. 174, edition of 1715, where it is stated that

Rene, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who died in 1480, introduced the

red-legged partridge into the latter country. Attempts have been made,

and I believe with success, to naturalize the European lark on Long

Island, and the English sparrow has been introduced into various parts

of the Northern States, where he is useful by destroying noxious insects

and worms not preyed upon by native birds. The humming-bird has resisted

all efforts to acclimate him in Europe, though they have not

unfrequently survived the passage across the ocean. In Switzerland and

some other parts of Europe the multiplication of insectivorous birds is

encouraged by building nests for them, and it is alleged that both fruit

and forest trees have been essentially benefited by the protection thus

afforded them.] but the distribution of birds is very much influenced by

the character of his industry, and the transplantation, of every object

of agricultural production is, at a longer or shorter interval, followed

by that of the birds which feed upon its seeds, or more frequently upon

the insects it harbors. The vulture, the crow, and other winged

scavengers, follow the march of armies as regularly as the wolf. Birds

accompany ships on long voyages, for the sake of the offal which is

thrown overboard, and, in such cases, it might often happen that they

would breed and become naturalized in countries where they had been

unknown before. [Footnote: Gulls hover about ships in port, and often

far out at sea, diligently watching for the waste of the caboose. While

the four great fleets, English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were

lying in the Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady

of my family called my attention to the fact that the gulls were far

more numerous about the ships of one of the fleets than about the

others. This was verified by repeated observation, and the difference

was owing no doubt to the greater abundance of the refuse from the

cookrooms of the naval squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons

acquainted with the economy of the navies of the states in question,

will be able to conjecture which fleet was most favored with these

delicate attentions. The American gull follows the steamers up the

Mississippi, and has been shot 1,500 miles from the sea.] There is a

familiar story of an English bird which built its nest in an unused

block in the rigging of a ship, and made one or two short voyages with

the vessel while hatching its eggs. Had the young become fledged while

lying in a foreign harbor, they would of course have claimed the rights

of citizenship in the country where they first took to the wing.

[Footnote: Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships

bound for foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A

stork, which had nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had,

by some accident, injured a wing, and was unable to join his fellows

when they commenced their winter migration to the banks of the Nile.

Before he was able to fly again, he was caught, and the flag of the

nation to which the palace belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was

easily identified at a considerable distance. As his wing grew stronger,

he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a

vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a passing ship bound southward,

and perched himself on a topsail-yard. I happened to witness this

movement, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I

could discern him with a spy-glass. I supposed he finished the voyage,

for he certainly did not return to the palace.]

An unfortunate popular error greatly magnifies the injury done to the

crops of grain and leguminous vegetables by wild birds. Very many of

those generally supposed to consume large quantities of the seeds of

cultivated plants really feed almost exclusively upon insects, and

frequent the wheatfields, not for the sake of the grain, but for the

eggs, larvae, and fly of the multiplied tribes of insect life which are

so destructive to the harvests. This fact has been so well established

by the examination of the stomachs of great numbers of birds in Europe

and the United States, at different seasons of the year, that it is no

longer open to doubt, and it appears highly probable that even the

species which consume more or less grain generally make amends by

destroying insects whose ravages would have been still more injurious.

[Footnote: Even the common crow has found apologists, and it has been

asserted that he pays for the Indian corn he consumes by destroying the

worms and larva which infest that plant.

Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown American

robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight worms, weighing together

nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself, and another had

previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten worms, or

about twenty per cent. of his own weight. The largest of these numbers

appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent birds of the same

species, as they brought food to their young, to be much greater than

that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the old birds did not

return with worms or insects oftener than once in ten minutes on an

average. It we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve hours in a

day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have seventy-two worms,

or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood. It is probable

enough that some of the food collected by the parents may be more

nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller quantity

sufficed for the young in the nest than when reared under artificial

conditions.

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants

after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain

that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for

nourishment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the

English Alpine Club are not distinguished for appetites which would make

them unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has

had the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed

that laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most

valiant trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt

was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no

specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have

often inquired concerning their diet, and been assured by the jailers

that their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of

exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common

out-door laborers.] On this subject, we have much other evidence besides

that derived from dissection. Direct observation has shown, in many

instances, that the destruction of wild birds has been followed by a

great multiplication of noxious insects, and, on the other hand, that

these latter have been much reduced in numbers by the protection and

increase of the birds that devour them. Many interesting facts of this

nature have been collected by professed naturalists, but I shall content

myself with a few taken from familiar and generally accessible sources.

The following extract is from Michelet, L'Oiseau, pp. 169,170:

"The STINGY farmer--an epithet justly and feelingly bestowed by Virgil.

Avaricious, blind, indeed, who proscribes the birds--those destroyers of

insects, those defenders of his harvests. Not a grain for the creature

which, during the rains of winter, hunts the future insect, finds out

the nests of the larvae, examines, turns over every leaf, and destroys,

every day, thousands of incipient caterpillars. But sacks of corn for

the mature insect, whole fields for the grasshoppers, which the bird

would have made war upon. With eyes fixed upon his furrow, upon the

present moment only, without seeing and without foreseeing, blind to the

great harmony which is never broken with impunity, he has everywhere

demanded or approved laws for the extermination of that necessary ally

of his toil--the insectivorous bird. And the insect has well avenged the

bird. It has become necessary to revoke in haste the proscription. In

the Isle of Bourbon, for instance, a price was set on the head of the

martin; it disappeared, and the grasshopper took possession of the

island, devouring, withering, scorching with a biting drought all that

they did not consume. In North America it has been the same with the

starling, the protector of Indian corn. [Footnote: I hope Michelet has

good authority for this statement, but I am unable to confirm it.] Even

the sparrow, which really does attack grain, but which protects it still

more, the pilferer, the outlaw, loaded with abuse and smitten with

curses--it has been found in Hungary that they were likely to perish

without him, that he alone could sustain the mighty war against the

beetles and the thousand winged enemies that swarm in the lowlands; they

have revoked the decree of banishment, recalled in haste this valiant

militia, which, though deficient in discipline, is nevertheless the

salvation of the country. [Footnote: Apropos of the sparrow--a single

pair of which, according to Michelet, p. 315, carries to the nest four

thousand and three hundred caterpillar or coleoptera in a week--I find

in an English newspaper a report of a meeting of a "Sparrow Club,"

stating that the member who took the first prize had destroyed 1,467 of

these birds within the year, and that the prowess of the other members

had brought the total number up to 11,944 birds, besides 2,553 eggs.

Every one of the fourteen thousand hatched and unhatched birds, thus

sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved

his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain.]

"Not long since, in the neighborhood of Ronen and in the valley of

Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. The beetles

profited well by this proscription; their larvae, infinitely multiplied,

carried on their subterranean labors with such success, that a meadow

was shown me, the surface of which was completely dried up, every

herbaceous root was consumed, and the whole grassy mantle, easily

loosened, might have been rolled up and carried away like a carpet."

The general hostility of the European populace to the smaller birds is,

in part, the remote effect of the reaction created by the game laws.

When the restrictions imposed upon the chase by those laws were suddenly

removed in France, the whole people at once commenced a destructive

campaign against every species of wild animal. Arthur Young, writing in

Provence, on the 30th of August, 1789, soon after the National Assembly

had declared the chase free, thus complains of the annoyance he

experienced from the use made by the peasantry of their newly-won

liberty. "One would think that every rusty firelock in all Provence was

at work in the indiscriminate destruction of all the birds. The wadding

buzzed by my ears, or fell into my carriage, five or six times in the

course of the day." ... "The declaration of the Assembly that every man

is free to hunt on his own land ... has filled all France with an

intolerable cloud of sportsmen. ... The declaration speaks of

compensations and indemnities [to the seigneurs], but the ungovernable

populace takes advantage of the abolition of the game laws and laughs at

the obligation imposed by the decree."

The contagious influence of the French Revolution occasioned the removal

of similar restrictions, with similar results, in other countries. The

habits then formed have become hereditary on the Continent, and though

game laws still exist in England, there is little doubt that the blind

prejudices of the ignorant and half-educated classes in that country

against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation,

which, by restricting the chase of game worth killing, drives the

unprivileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all wild

life which is not reserved for the amusement of his betters. Hence the

lord of the manor buys his partridges and his hares by sacrificing the

bread of his tenants, and so long as the members of "Sparrow Clubs" are

forbidden to follow higher game, they will suicidally revenge themselves

by destroying the birds which protect their wheatfields.

On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative scarcity and

dearness of animal food combine with the feeling I have just mentioned

to stimulate still further the destructive passions of the fowler. In

the Tuscan province of Grosseto, containing less than 2,000 square

miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes and other small birds are annually

brought to market. [Footnote: Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane,

p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen

or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are

the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small

birds and drive them down into the nets by throwing stones over them.

In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with

grove-like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors.

These serve to collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great

numbers. These plantatious are called ragnaje, and the reader will find,

in Bindi's edition of Davanzati, a very pleasant description of a

ragnaja, though its authorship is not now ascribed to that eminent

writer. Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die

Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vogel, many interesting facts

respecting the utility of birds, and, the wanton destruction of them in

Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more

familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying

great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service

becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the

moles are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the

Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles of

land under water. See Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1847, 1 semestre,

p. 150; VOGT, Nutzliche und schadliche Thiere; and particularly articles

in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 16.

See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 707, an article entitled Nutzen

der Vogel fur die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that "without

birds no agriculture or even vegetation would be possible." In an

interesting memoir by Rondani, published in the Bolletino del Comizio

agrario di Parma for December, 1868, it is maintained that birds are

often injurious to the agriculturist, by preying not only on noxious

insects, but sometimes exclusively, or at least by preference, on

entomophagous tribes which would otherwise destroy those injurious to

cultivated plants. See also articles by Prof. Sabbioni in the Giornale

di Agricoltura di Bologna, November and December, 1870, and other

articles in the same journal of 15th and 30th April, 1870.]

Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility of

accommodation, [Footnote: Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits.

The extension of particular branches of agriculture introduces new

birds; but unless in the case of such changes in physical conditions,

particular species seem indissolubly attached to particular localities.

The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly the same precise line

of flight in their annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same

breeding-places from year to year. The stork is a strong-winged bird and

roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. He is

common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six pairs

of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the

European shore of the narrow Bosphorous, while--much to the satisfaction

of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so

orthodox a bird--dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic

side are crowned with his nests. The appearance of the dove-like grouse,

Tetrao paradoxus, or Syrrhaptus Pallassi, in various parts of Europe, in

1850 and the following years, is a noticable exception to the law of

regularity which seems to govern the movements and determine the habitat

of birds. The proper home of this bird is the Steppes of Tartary, and it

is no recorded to have been observed in Europe, or at least west of

Russia, until the year above mentioned, when many flocks of twenty or

thirty, and even a hundred individuals, were seen in Bohemia, Germany,

Holland, Denmark, England, Ireland, and France. A considerable flock

frequented the Frisian island of Borkum for more than five months. It

was hoped that they would breed and remain permanently in the island but

this expectation has now been disappointed, and the steppe-grouse seems

to have disappeared again altogether.] and they are more severely

affected by climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally

want the special means of shelter against the inclemency of the weather

and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and dens afford to

burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of prey. The egg is exposed

to many dangers before hatching, and the young bird is especially

tender, defenceless, and helpless. Every cold rain, every violent wind,

every hailstorm during the breeding season, destroys hundreds of

nestlings, and the parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding

over it in the vain effort to protect it. [Footnote: It is not the

unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to destruction by

severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged tribes are

killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by a sensible

diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a cold storm

in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On the 10th

of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. The

next morning I found a hummingbird killed by the cold, and hanging by

its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden

building where it had sought shelter.] The great proportional numbers of

birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which, by their power

of flight they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to

secure them from extirpation, and even from very great numerical

reduction. But experience shows that when not protected by law, by

popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, they

yield very readily to the hostile influences of civilization, and,

though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase

of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry

is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred

upon by man. [Footnote: Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 400, observes: "Of

birds it is estimated that the number of those which die every year

equals the aggregate number by which the species to which they

respectively belong is, on the average, permanently represented." A

remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds was

observed upon the establishment of a light-house on Cape Cod some years

since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, more

than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly

water-fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in

the course of the night by flying against the thick glass or grating of

the lantern. From an article by A. Esquiros, in the Revue des Deux

Mondes for Sept. 1, 1864, entitled, La vie Anglaise, p. 110, it appears

that such occurrences as that stated in the note have been not

unfrequent on the British coast. Are the birds thus attracted by new

lights, flocks in migration?

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and

other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their

annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they

follow the high roads in their passage across the mountains. This is

partly because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend

is principally found near the roads. It is, however, not altogether for

the sake of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that

their line of flight conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather

because the great roads are carried through the natural depressions in

the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these routes

without rising to a height where at the seasons of migration the cold

would be excessive. The instinct which guides migratory birds in their

course is not in all cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by

changes in the condition of the surface. I am familiar with a village in

New England, at the junction of two valleys, each drained by a

mill-stream, where the flocks of wild geese which formerly passed, every

spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it was popularly

phrased, and I have often heard their screams in the night as they flew

wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the village

lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of

the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the

landscape features not according with the ideal map handed down in the

anserine family, and thus deranged its traditional geography.]

Nature sets bounds to the disproportionate increase of birds, while at

the same time, by the multitude of their resources, she secures them

from extinction through her own spontaneous agencies. Man both preys

upon them and wantonly destroys them. The delicious flavor of

game-birds, and the skill implied in the various arts of the sportsman

who devotes himself to fowling, make them favorite objects of the chase,

while the beauty of their plumage, as a military and feminine

decoration, threatens to involve the sacrifice of the last survivor of

many once numerous species. Thus far, but few birds described by ancient

or modern naturalists are known to have become absolutely extinct,

though there are some cases in which they are ascertained to have

utterly disappeared from the face of the earth in very recent times. The

most familiar instances are those of the dodo, a large bird peculiar to

the Mauritius or Isle of France, exterminated about the year 1690, and

now known only by more or less fragmentary skeletons, and the solitary,

which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, but has not been

seen for more than a century. A parrot and some other birds of the

Norfolk Island group are said to have lately become extinct. The

wingless auk, Alca impennis, a bird remarkable for its excessive

fatness, was very abundant two or three hundred years ago in the Faroe

Islands, and on the whole Scandinavian seaboard. The early voyagers

found either the same or a closely allied species, in immense numbers,

on all the coasts and islands of Newfoundland. The value of its flesh

and its oil made it one of the most important resources of the

inhabitants of those sterile regions, and it was naturally an object of

keen pursuit. It is supposed to be now completely extinct, and few

museums can show even its skeleton. There seems to be strong reason to

believe that modern civilization is guiltless of one or two sins of

extermination which have been committed in recent ages. Now Zealand

formerly possessed several species of dinornis, one of which, called moa

by the islanders, was larger than the ostrich. The condition in which

the bones of these birds have been found and the traditions of the

natives concur to prove that, though the aborigines had probably

extirpated them before the discovery of New Zealand by the whites, they

still existed at a comparatively late period. The same remarks apply to

a winged giant the eggs of which have been brought from Madagascar. This

bird must have much exceeded the dimensions of the moa, at least so far

as we can judge from the egg, which is eight times as large as the

average size of the ostrich egg, or about one hundred and fifty times

that of the hen.

But though we have no evidence that man has exterminated many species of

birds, we know that his persecutions have caused their disappearance

from many localities where they once were common, and greatly diminished

their numbers in others. The cappercailzie, Tetrao urogallus, the finest

of the grouse family, formerly abundant in Scotland, had become extinct

in Great Britain, but has been reintroduced from Sweden. [Footnote:

Thecappercailzie, or tjader, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of

singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts

which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger

Laestadius frequently notices the tjader, in his very remarkable account

of the Swedish Laplanders. The tjader, though not a bird of passage, is

migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake

very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Laestadius,

"he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the

country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to

sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is

accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, towards the

mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly

course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in

Lapland. From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald

mountains, when he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home,

the wood; but when he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot

alight to rest and collect himself, he flies on until he is exhausted

and falls into the sea."--Petrus Laestadius, Journal of forsta aret,

etc., p. 325.]

The ostrich is mentioned, by many old travellers, as common on the

Isthmus of Suez down to the middle of the seventeenth century. It

appears to have frequented Palestine, Syria, and even Asia Minor at

earlier periods, but is now rarely found except in the seclusion of

remoter deserts. [Footnote: Frescobaldi saw ostriches between Suez and

Mt. Sinai. Viaggio in Terra Santa, p. 65. See also Vansler, Voyage

d'Egypte, p. 103, and an article in Petermann, Mittheilungen, 1870, p.

880, entitled Die Verbreitung des Straussee in Asien.]

The modern increased facilities of transportation have brought distant

markets within reach of the professional hunter, and thereby given a new

impulse to his destructive propensities. Not only do all Great Britain

and Ireland contribute to the supply of game for the British capital,

but the canvas-back duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen from

the basin of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls of the London

poulterer. Kohl [Footnote: Die Herzogthumer Schleswig und Holstein, i.,

p. 203.] informs us that, on the coasts of the North Sea, twenty

thousand wild ducks are usually taken in the course of the season in a

single decoy, and sent to the large maritime towns for sale. The

statistics of the great European cities show a prodigious consumption of

game-birds, but the official returns fall far below the truth, because

they do not include the rural districts, and because neither the poacher

nor his customers report the number of his victims. Reproduction, in

cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with this excessive destruction,

and there is no doubt that all the wild birds which are chased for their

flesh or their plumage are diminishing with a rapidity which justifies

the fear that the last of them will soon follow the dodo and the

wingless auk.

Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their flesh or for

their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used as food, are, so

far as we know the functions appointed to them by nature, not otherwise

specially useful to man, and, therefore, their wholesale destruction is

an economical evil only in the same sense in which all waste of

productive capital is an evil. [Footnote: The increased demand for

animal oils for the use of the leather-dresses is now threatening the

penguin with the fate of the wingless auk. According to the Report of

the Agricultural Department of the U. S. for August and September, 1871,

p. 840, small vessels are fitted out for the chase of this bird, and

return from a six week's cruise with 25,000 or 30,000 gallons of oil.

About eleven birds are required for a gallon, and consequently the

vessels take upon an average 800,000 penguins each.]

If it were possible to confine the consumption of game-fowl to a number

equal to the annual increase, the world would be a gainer, but not to

the same extent as it would be by checking the wanton sacrifice of

millions of the smaller birds, which are of no real value as food, but

which, as we have seen, render a most important service by battling, in

our behalf, as well as in their own, against the countless legions of

humming and of creeping things, with which the prolific powers of insect

life would otherwise cover the earth.

Utility and Destruction of Reptiles.

The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally regarded

expose him to constant persecution by man, and perhaps no other animal

is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. Nevertheless, snakes as well as

lizards and other reptiles are not wholly useless to their great enemy.

The most formidable foes of the insect, and even of the small rodents,

are the reptiles. The chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the

twig of a tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until,

at the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and

rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches the swift

and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the warm countries of

Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very essentially to the

reduction of the insect population, which they both surprise in the

winged state upon walls and trees, and consume as egg, worm, and

chrysalis, in their earlier metamorphoses. The serpents feed much upon

insects, as well as upon mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also

other snakes.

In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any beast or bird

of prey except the stork, and they have few dangerous enemies but man,

though in the tropics other animals prey upon them. [Footnote: It is

very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular belief

in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful

experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed

enmity is wholly imaginary. It is however affirmed in an article in

Nature, June 11, 1872, p. 215, that the pigs have exterminated the

rattlesnake in some parts of Oregon, and that swine are destructive to

the cobra de capello in India. Observing that the starlings, stornelli,

which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something from their

nests and dropped it upon the ground about as often they brought food to

their young, I watched their proceedings, and found every day lying near

the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and, in a few cases, small

lizards, which had, in every Instance, lost about two inches of the

tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and

threw away the remainder.] It is doubtful whether any species of serpent

has been exterminated within the human period, and even the dense

population of China has not been able completely to rid itself of the

viper. They have, however, almost entirely disappeared from particular

localities. The rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large

districts where it was extremely common half a century ago, and

Palestine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous serpents,

at least very nearly so. [Footnote: Russell denies the existence of

poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and states that the last instance of

death known to have occurred from the bite of a serpent near Aleppo took

place a hundred years before his time. In Palestine, the climate, the

thinness of population, the multitude of insects and of lizards, all

circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the multiplication of

serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely rare, if at

all known, in that country. I have, however, been assured by persons

very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite

of snakes had occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at other

places on the southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In Egypt, on

the other hand, the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as numerous as

ever, and are much dreaded by all the natives except the professional

snake charmers.

The recent great multiplication of vipers in some parts of France is a

singular and startling fact. Toussenel, quoting from official documents,

states, that upon the offer of a reward of fifty centimes, or ten cents,

a head, TWELVE THOUSAND vipers were brought to the prefect of a single

department, and that in 1850 fifteen hundred snakes and twenty quarts of

snakes' eggs were found under a farm-house hearthstone. The granary, the

stables, the roof, the very beds swarmed with serpents, and the family

were obliged to abandon its habitation. Dr. Viaugrandmarais, of Nantes,

reported to the prefect of his department more than two hundred recent

cases of viper bites, twenty-four of which proved fatal.--Tristia, p.

176 et seqq. According to the Journal del Debats for Oct. 1st, 1867, the

Department of the Cote d'Or paid in the year 1866 eighteen thousand

francs for the destruction of vipers. The reward was thirty centimes a

head, and consequently the number killed was about sixty thousand. A

friend residing in that department informs me that it was strongly

suspected that many of these snakes were imported from other departments

for the sake of the premium.

In Nature for 1870 and 1871 we are told that the number of deaths from

the bites of venomous serpents in the Bengal Presidency, in the year

1869, was 11,416, and that in the whole of British India not less than

40,000 human lives are annually lost from this cause. In one small

department, a reward of from three to six pence a head for poisonous

serpents brought in 1,200 a day, and in two months the government paid

L10,000 sterling for their destruction.] The serpent does not appear to

have any natural limit of growth, and we are therefore not authorized

wholly to discredit the evidence of ancient naturalists in regard to the

extraordinary dimensions which those reptiles are said by them to have

sometimes attained. The use of firearms has enabled man to reduce the

numbers of the larger serpents, and they do not often escape him long

enough to arrive at the size ascribed to them by travellers a century or

two ago. Captain Speke, however, shot a serpent in Africa which measured

fifty-one and a half feet in length.

Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by discover that

insects and worms are as essential as the larger organisms to the proper

working of the great terraqueous machine, and we shall have as eloquent

pleas in defence of the mosquito, and perhaps oven of the tzetze-fly, as

Toussenel and Michelet have framed in behalf of the bird. The silkworm,

the lac insect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the

puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient in the

ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recognize the grain of the

kermes and the cochineal in the gay habiliments of the holiday groups

beneath them.

These humble forms of being are seldom conspicuous by more mass, and

though the winds and the waters sometimes sweep together large heaps of

locusts and even of may-flies, their remains are speedily decomposed,

their exuviae and their structures form no strata, and still less does

nature use them, as she does the calcareous and silicious cases and

dwellings of animalcular species, to build reefs and spread out

submarine deposits, which subsequent geological action may convert into

islands and even mountains. [Footnote: Although the remains of extant

animals are rarely, if ever, gathered In sufficient quantities to

possess any geographical importance by their mere mass, the decayed

exuviae of even the smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes

abundant enough to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and

atmosphere. "The plain of Cumana," saya Humboldt, "presents a remarkable

phenomenon, after heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the

rays of the sun, diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to

animals of very different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of

tiger-cat, the cabiai, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper,

and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma,

appear to be disengaged in proportion as the soil, which contains the

remains of an innumerable multitude of reptiles, worms, and insects,

begins to be impregnated with water. Wherever we stir the earth, we are

struck with the mass of organic substances which in turn are developed

and become transformed or decomposed. Nature in these climes seems more

active, more prolific, and, so to speak, more prodigal of life."]

But the action of the creeping and swarming things of the earth, though

often passed unnoticed, is not without important effects in the general

economy of nature. The geographical importance of insects proper, as

well as of worms, depends principally on their connection with vegetable

life as agents of its fecundation, and of its destruction. We learn from

Darwin, "On Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids

are Fertilized by Insects," that some six thousand species of orchids

are absolutely dependent upon the agency of insects for their

fertilization, and that consequently, were those plants unvisited by

insects, they would all rapidly disappear. What is true of the orchids

is more or less true of many other vegetable families. [Footnote: Later

observations of Darwin and other naturalists have greatly raised former

estimates of the importance of insect life in the fecundation of plants,

and among other remarkable discoveries it has been found that, in many

cases at least, insects are necessary even to monoecious vegetables,

because the male flower does not impregnate the female growing on the

same stem, and the latter can be fecundated only by pollen supplied to

it by insects from another plant of the same species.

"Who would ever have thought," says Preyer, "that the abundance and

beauty of the pansy and of the clover were dependent upon the number of

cats and owls But so it is. The clover and the pansy cannot exist

without the bumble-bee, which, in search of his vegetable nectar,

transports unconciously the pollen from the masculine to the feminine

flower, a service which other insects perform only partially for these

plants. Their existence therefore depends upon that of the bumble-bee.

The mice make war upon this bee. In their fondness for honey they

destroy the nest and at the same time the bee. The principal enemies of

mice are cats and owls, and therefore the finest clovers and the most

beautiful pansies are found near villages where cats and owls

abound."--Preyer, Der Kampf um daas Dasein, p. 22. See also Delpino,

Pensieri sulla biologia vegetale, and other works of the same able

observer on vegetable physiology.]

We do not know the limits of this agency, and many of the insects

habitually regarded as unqualified pests, may directly or indirectly

perform functions as important to the most valuable plants as the

services rendered by certain tribes to the orchids. I say directly or

indirectly, because, besides the other arrangements of nature for

chocking the undue multiplication of particular species, she has

established a police among insects themselves, by which some of them

keep down or promote the increase of others; for there are insects, as

well as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect which

fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of another insect which

constitutes his food in some stage of his life, and this other again may

be as injurious to some plant as his destroyer is to a different

species.

The ancients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang branches of

the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that the insects which

frequented the former might hasten the ripening of the cultivated fig by

their punctures--or, as others suppose, might fructify it by

transporting to it the pollen of the wild fruit--and this process,

called caprification, is not yet entirely obsolete. [Footnote: The

utility of caprification has been a good deal disputed, and it has, I

believe, been generally abandoned in Italy, though still practised in

Greece. See Browne, The Trees of America, p. 475, and on caprification

in Kabylia, N. Bibesco, Les Kabyles du Djardjura, in Revue des Deux

Mondes for April 1st, 1805, p. 580; also, Aus der Natur, vol. xxx., p.

684, and Phipson,

Utilization of Minute Life, p. 50. In some parts of Sicily, sprigs of

mint, mentha pulegium, are used instead of branches of the wild for

caprification. Pitre, Usi popolari Siciliani, 1871, p. 18.]

The perforations of the earthworms and of many insect larvae

mechanically affect the texture of the soil and its permeability by

water, and they therefore have a certain influence on the form and

character of terrestrial surface. The earthworms long ago made good

their title to the respect and gratitude of the farmer as well as of the

angler. Their utility has been pointed out in many scientific as well as

in many agricultural treatises. The following extract from an essay on

this subject will answer my present purpose:

"Worms are great assistants to the drainer, and valuable aids to the

fanner in keeping up the fertility of the soil. They love moist, but not

wet soils; they will bore down to, but not into water; they multiply

rapidly on land after drainage, and prefer a deeply-dried soil. On

examining part of a field which had been deeply drained, after

long-previous shallow drainage, it was found that the worms had greatly

increased in number, and that their bores descended quite to the level

of the pipes. Many worm-bores were large enough to receive the little

finger. A piece of land near the sea, in Lincolnshire, over which the

sea had broken and killed all the worms, remained sterile until the

worms again inhabited it. A piece of pasture land, in which worms were

in such numbers that it was thought their casts interfered too much with

its produce, was rolled at night in order to destroy the worms. The

result was, that the fertility of the field greatly declined, nor was it

restored until they had recruited their numbers, which was aided by

collecting and transporting multitudes of worms from the fields.

"The great depth into which worms will bore, and from which they push up

fine fertile soil, and cast it on the surface, have been well shown by

the fact that in a few years they have actually elevated the surface of

fields by a largo layer of rich mould, several inches thick, thus

affording nourishment to the roots of grasses, and increasing the

productiveness of the soil."

It should be added that the writer quoted, and all others who have

discussed the subject, have, so far as I know, overlooked one very

important element in the fertilization produced by earthworms. I refer

to the enrichment of the soil by their excreta during life, and by the

decomposition of their remains when they die. Themanure thus furnished

is as valuable as the like amount of similar animal products derived

from higher organisms, and when we consider the prodigious numbers of

these worms found on a single square yard of some soils, we may easily

see that they furnish no insignificant contribution to the nutritive

material required for the growth of plants. [Footnote: I believe there

is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms attack the tuber of

the potato. Some of them, especially one or two species employed by

anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are at least rare in shaded

grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the soil is brought under

cultivation. Forty or fifty years ago they were so scarce in the newer

parts of New England, that the rustic fishermen of every village kept

secret the few places where they were to be found in their neighborhood,

as a professional mystery, but at present one can hardly turn over a

shovelfull of rich moist soil anywhere, without unearthing several of

them. A very intelligent lady, born in the woods of Northern New

England, told me that, in her childhood, these worms were almost unknown

in that region, though anxiously sought for by the anglers, but that

they increased as the country was cleared, and at last became so

numerous in some places, that the water of springs, and even of shallow

wells, which had formerly been excellent, was rendered undrinkable by

the quantity of dead worms that fell into them. The increase of the

robin and other small birds which follow the settler when he has

prepared a suitable home for them, at last checked the excessive

multiplication of the worms, and abated the nuisance.]

The carnivorous and often herbivorous insects render another important

service to man by consuming dead and decaying animal and vegetable

matter, the decomposition of which would otherwise fill the air with

effluvia noxious to health. Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for

instance, bury the small animals in which they lay their eggs, and

thereby prevent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. The

prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the great numbers of

the individuals in many species, and the voracity of most of them while

in the larva state, justify the appellation of nature's scavengers which

has been bestowed upon them, and there is very little doubt that, in

warm countries, they consume a larger quantity of putrescent organic

matter than the quadrupeds and birds which feed upon such aliment.

INJURY TO THE FOREST BY INSECTS.

The action of the insect on vegetation, as we have thus far described

it, is principally exerted on smaller and less conspicuous plants, and

it is therefore matter rather of agricultural than of geographical

interest. But in the economy of the forest European writers ascribe to

insect life an importance which it has not reached in America, where the

spontaneous woods are protected by safeguards of nature's own devising.

The insects which damage primitive forests by feeding upon products of

trees essential to their growth, are not numerous, nor is their

appearance, in destructive numbers, frequent, and those which perforate

the stems and branches, to deposit and hatch their eggs, more commonly

select dead trees for that purpose, though, unhappily, there are

important exceptions to this latter remark. [Footnote: The locust

Insect, Clitus pictus, which deposits its eggs in the American locust,

Robinia pseudacacia, is one of these, and its ravages have been and

still are more destructive to that very valuable tree, so remarkable for

combining rapidity of growth with strength and durability of wood. This

insect, I believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so

general employment of the Robinia to clothe and protect embankments and

the scarps of deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief.

As a traveller, however, I should find some compensation for this evil

in the destruction of these acacia hedges, which as completely obstruct

the view on hundreds of miles of French and Italian railways, as do the

garden walls of the same countries on the ordinary roads.

The lignivorous insects that attack living trees almost uniformly

confine their ravages to trees already unsound or diseased in growth

from the depredations of leaf-eaters, such as caterpillars and the like,

or from other causes. The decay of the tree, therefore, is the cause not

the consequence of the invasions of the borer. This subject has been

discussed by Perris in the Annales de la Societe Entomologique de la

France for 1852, and his conclusions are confirmed by the observations

of Samanos, who quotes, at some length, the views of Perris. "Having,

for fifteen years," says the latter author, "incessantly studied the

habits of lignivorous insects in one of the best wooded regions of

France, I have observed facts enough to feel myself warranted in

expressing my conclusions, which are: that insects in general--I am

trees in sound health, and they assail those only whose normal

conditions and functions have been by some cause impaired."

See, more fully, Samanos, Traite de la Culture du Pin Maritime, Paris,

1864, pp. 140-145, and Siemoni, Manuale dell' Arte Forestale. 2d

edition. Florence, 1872.]

I do not know that we have any evidence of the destruction or serious

injury of American forests by insects before or even soon after the

period of colonization; but since the white man has laid bare a vast

proportion of the earth's surface, and thereby produced changes

favorable, perhaps, to the multiplication of these pests, they have

greatly increased in numbers, and, apparently, in voracity also. Not

many years ago, the pines on thousands of acres of land in North

Carolina were destroyed by insects not known to have ever done serious

injury to that tree before. In such cases as this and others of the like

sort, there is good reason to believe that man is the indirect cause of

an evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever

the birds which feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton

destruction of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipes

implumis, the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal

orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowny beetle's evening

drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest

ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies.

[Footnote: In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more

numerous and destructive to trees than in the primitive forests of

America, and the same remark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as

moles, mice, and squirrels. In the dense native wood, the ground and the

air are too humid, the depth of shade too great, for many tribes of

these creatures, while near the natural meadows and other open grounds,

where circumstances are otherwise more favorable for their existence and

multiplication, their numbers are kept down by birds, serpents, foxes,

and smaller predacious quadrupeds. In civilized countries these natural

enemies of the worm, the beetle, and the mole, are persecuted, sometimes

almost exterminated, by man, who also removes from his plantations the

decayed or wind-fallen trcea, the shrubs and underwood, which, in a

state of nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the rodent,

and often also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect

and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of

the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive

multiplication, and they become destructive to the forest because they

are driven to the living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of

Fontainebleau is almost wholly without birds, and their absence is

ascribed by some writers to the want of water, which, in the thirsty

sands of that wood, does not gather into running brooks; but the want of

undergrowth is perhaps an equally good reason for their scarcity.

On the other hand, the thinning out of the forest and the removal of

underwood and decayed timber, by which it is brought more nearly to the

condition of an artificial wood, is often destructive to insect tribes

which, though not injurious to trees, are noxious to man. Thus the

troublesome woodtick, formerly very abundant in the North Eastern, as it

unhappily still is in native forests in the Southern and Western States,

has become nearly or quite extinct in the former region since the woods

have been reduced in extent and laid more open to the sun and air.--Asa

Fitch, in Report of New York Agricultural Society for 1870, pp.

868,864.]

Introduction of Insects.

The general tendency of man's encroachments upon spontaneous nature has

been to increase insect life at the expense of vegetation and of the

smaller quadrupeds and birds. Doubtless there are insects in all woods,

but in temperate climates they are comparatively few and harmless, and

the most numerous tribes which breed in the forest, or rather in its

waters, and indeed in all solitudes, are those which little injure

vegetation, such as mosquitoes, gnats, and the like. With the cultivated

plants of man come the myriad tribes which feed or breed upon them, and

agriculture not only introduces new speciss, but so multiplies the

number of individuals as to defy calculation. Newly introduced

vegetables frequently escape for years the insect plagues which had

infested them in their native habitat; but the importation of other

varieties of the plant, the exchange of seed, or some more accident, is

sure in the long run to carry the egg, the larva, or the chrysalis to

the most distant shores where the plant assigned to it by nature as its

possession has preceded it. For many years after the colonization of the

United States, few or none of the insects which attack wheat in its

different stages of growth, were known in America. During the

Revolutionary war, the Hessian fly, Cecidomyia destructrix, made its

appearance, and it was so called because it was first observed in the

year when the Hessian troops were brought over, and was popularly

supposed to have been accidentally imported by those unwelcome

strangers. Other destroyers of cereal grains have since found their way

across the Atlantic, and a noxious European aphis has first attacked the

American wheatfields within the last fifteen years. Unhappily, in these

cases of migration, the natural corrective of excessive multiplication,

the parasitic or voracious enemy of the noxious insect, does not always

accompany the wanderings of its prey, and the bane long precedes the

antidote. Hence, in the United States, the ravages of imported insects

injurious to cultivated crops, not being checked by the counteracting

influences which nature had provided to limit their devastations in the

Old World, are more destructive than in Europe. It is not known that the

wheat midge is preyed upon in America by any other insect, and in

seasons favorable to it, it multiplies to a degree which would prove

almost fatal to the entire harvest, were it not that, in the great

territorial extent of the United States, there is room for such

differences of soil and climate as, in a given year, to present in one

State all the conditions favorable to the increase of a particular

insect, while in another, the natural influences are hostile to it. The

only apparent remedy for this evil is, to balance the disproportionate

development of noxious foreign species by bringing from their native

country the tribes which prey upon them. This, it seems, has been

attempted. The United States Census Report for 1860, p. 82, states that

the New York Agricultural Society "has introduced into this country from

abroad certain parasites which Providence has created to counteract the

destructive powers of some of these depredators." [Footnote: On

parasitic and entomophagous insects, see a paper by Rondani referred to

p. 119 ante.]

This is, however, not the only purpose for which man has designedly

introduced foreign forms of insect life. The eggs of the silkworm are

known to have been brought from the farther East to Europe in the sixth

century, and new silk-spinners which feed on the castor-oil bean and the

ailanthus, have recently been reared in France and in South America with

promising success. [Footnote: The silkworm which feeds on the ailanthus

has naturalized itself in the United States, but also the promises of

its utility have not been realized.] The cochineal, long regularly bred

in aboriginal America, has been transplanted to Spain, and both the

kermes insect and the cantharides have been transferred to other

climates than their own. The honey--bee must be ranked next to the

silkworm in economical importance. This useful creature was carried to

the United States by European colonists, in the latter part of

theseventeenth century; it did not cross the Mississippi till the close

of the eighteenth, and it is only in 1853 that it was transported to

California, where it was previously unknown. The Italian bee, which

seldom stings, has lately been introduced into the United States.

[Footnote: Bee husbandry, now very general in Switzerland and other

Alpine regions, was formerly an important branch of industry in Italy.

It has lately been revived and is now extensively prosecuted it that

country. It is interesting to observe that many of the methods recently

introduced into this art in England and United States, such for example

as the removable honey--boxes, are reinventions of Italian systeams at

least three hundred years old. See Gallo, Le Venti Giornate dell'

Agricultura, cap. XV. The temporary decline of this industry in Italy

was doubtless in great measure due to the use of sugar which had taken

the place of honed, but perhaps also in part to the decrease of the wild

vegetation from which the bee draws more or less of his nutriment. A new

was-producing insect, a species of coccus, very abundant in China, where

its annual produce is said to amount to the value of ten millions of

francs, has recently attracted notice in France. The wax is white,

resembling spermaceti, and is said to be superior to that of the bee.]

The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man bear but a small

portion to those accidentally introduced by him. Plants and animals

often carry their parasites with them, and the traffic of commercial

countries, which exchange their products with every zone and every stage

of social existence, cannot fail to transfer in both directions the

minute organisms that are, in one way or another associated with almost

every object important to the material interests of man. [Footnote: A

few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in

discharging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the

continent, was fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown

insect, which ran out from a hide he was handling.

The Phylloxera vastatrix, the most destructive pest which has ever

attacked European vineyards--for its ravages are fatal not merely to the

fruit, but to the vine itself--in said by many entomologists to be of

American origin, but I have seen no account of the mode of its

introduction.]

The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their prodigious

fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different phases

of their existence, [Footnote: In many insects, some of the stages of

life regularly continue for several years, and they may, under peculiar

circumstances, be almost indefinitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions the

following remarkable case of this sort: "I saw here an insect, about an

inch in length, of a brown color tinged with orange, with two antennae,

not unlike a rosebug. This insect came out of a tea-table made of the

boards of an apple-tree." Dr. Dwight found the "cavity whence the insect

had emerged into the light," to be "about two inches in length. Between

the hole, and the outside of the leaf of the table, there were forty

grains of the wood." It was supposed that the sawyer and the

cabinet-maker must have removed at least thirteen grains more, and the

table had been in the possession of its proprietor for twenty years.]

the security of the retreats into which their small dimensions enable

them to retire, are all circumstances very favorable not only to the

perpetuity of their species, but to their transportation to distant

climates and their multiplication in their new homes. The teredo, so

destructive to shipping, has been carried by the vessels whose wooden

walls it mines to almost every part of the globe. The termite, or white

ant, is said to have been brought to Rochefort by the commerce of that

port a hundred years ago. [Footnote: It does not appear to be quite

settled whether the termites of France are indigenous or imported. See

Quatrefaces, Souvenirs d'un naturaliste, ii., pp. 400, 542, 543.

The white ant has lately appeared at St. Helena and is in a high degree

destructive, no wood but teak, and even that not always, resisting

it.--Nature for March 2d, 1871, p. 362.] This creature is more injurious

to wooden structures and implements than any other known insect. It eats

out almost the entire substance of the wood, leaving only thin

partitions between the galleries it excavates in it; but as it never

gnaws through the surface to the air, a stick of timber may be almost

wholly consumed without showing any external sign of the damage it has

sustained. The termite is found also in other parts of France, and

particularly at Rochelle, where, thus far, its ravages are confined to a

single quarter of the city. A borer, of similar habits, is not uncommon

in Italy, and you may see in that country handsome chairs and other

furniture which have been reduced by this insect to a framework of

powder of post, covered, and apparently held together, by nothing but

the varnish.

DESTRUCTION OF INSECTS.

It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to common

observers, that the aquatic larvae of some insects which in other stages

of their existence inhabit the land, constitute, at certain seasons, a

large part of the food of fresh-water fish, while other larvae, in their

turn, prey upon the spawn and even the young of their persecutors.

[Footnote: I have seen the larva of the dragon-fly in an aquarium bite

off the head of a young fish as long as itself.] The larvae of the

mosquito and the gnat are the favorite food of the trout in the wooded

regions where those insects abound. [Footnote: Insects and fish--which

prey upon and feed each other--are the only forms of animal life that

are numerous in the native woods, and their range is, of course, limited

by the extent of the waters. The great abundance of the trout, and of

other more or less allied genera in the lakes of Lapland, seems to be

due to the supply of food provided for them by the swarms of insects

which in the larva state inhabit the waters, or, in other stages of

their life, are accidentally swept into them. All travellers in the

north of Europe speak of the gnat and the mosquito as very serious

drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the summer tourist, who visits the head

of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight sun, and the brothers

Laestadius regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-arctic life.

"The persecutions of these insects," says Lars Levi Laestadius [Culex

pipiens, Culex reptans, and Culex pulicaris], "leave not a moment's

peace, by day or night, to any living creature. Not only man, but

cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer intolerably from their

bite." He adds in a note, "I will not affirm that they have ever

devoured a living man, but many young cattle, such as lambs and calves,

have been worried out of their lives by them. All the people of Lapland

declare that young birds are killed by them, and this is not improbable,

for birds are scarce after seasons when the midge, the gnlat, and the

mosquito are numerous."--Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, p. 50.

Petrus Laestadius makes similar statements in his Journal for forsta

urst, p. 283.]

Earlier in the year the trout feeds on the larvae of the May fly, which

is itself very destructive to the spawn of the salmon, and hence, by a

sort of house-that-Jack-built, the destruction of the mosquito, that

feeds the trout that preys on the May fly that destroys the eggs that

hatch the salmon that pampers the epicure, may occasion a scarcity of

this latter fish in waters where he would otherwise be abundant. Thus

all nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic

creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary

to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life with

which the Creator has peopled the earth.

I have said that man has promoted the increase of the insect and the

worm, by destroying the bird and the fish which feed upon them. Many

insects, in the four different stages of their growth, inhabit in

succession the earth, the water, and the air. In each of these elements

they have their special enemies, and, deep and dark as are the minute

recesses in which they hide themselves, they are pursued to the

remotest, obscurest corners by the executioners that nature has

appointed to punish their delinquencies, and furnished with cunning

contrivances for ferreting out the offenders and dragging them into the

light of day. One tribe of birds, the woodpeckers, seems to depend for

subsistence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or dying

trees, and it is, perhaps, needless to say that the injury these birds

do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk of the

tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring larvae, but to

extract the worm which has already begun his mining labors. Hence these

birds are not found where the forester removes trees as fast as they

become fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the

United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too

much decayed to serve for timber, and which, in that state, are worth

little for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they fall of

themselves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are filled with

borers, and often deeply cut by the woodpeckers, whose strong bills

enable them to penetrate to the very heart of the tree and drag out the

lurking larvae. After a few years, the stubs fall, or, as wood becomes

valuable, are cut and carried off for firewood, and, at the same time,

the farmer selects for felling, in the forest he has reserved as a

permanent source of supply of fuel and timber, the decaying trees which,

like the dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for both the worm and

his pursuer. We thus gradually extirpate this tribe of insects, and,

with them, the species of birds which subsist principally upon them.

Thus the fine, large, red-headed woodpecker, Picus erythrocephalus,

formerly very common in New England, has almost entirely disappeared

from those States, since the dead trees are gone, and the apples, his

favorite vegetable food, are less abundant.

There are even large quadrupeds which feed almost exclusively upon

insects. The ant-bear is strong enough to pull down the clay houses

built by the species of termites that constitute his ordinary diet, and

the curious ai-ai, a climbing quadruped of Madagascar, is provided with

a very slender, hook-nailed finger, long enough to reach far into a

hole in the trunk of a tree, and extract the worm which bored it.

[Footnote: On the destruction of insects by reptiles, see page 125

ante.]

Minute Organisms.

Besides the larger inhabitants of the land and of the sea, the

quadrupeds, the reptiles, the birds, the amphibia, the crustacea, the

fish, the insects, and the worms, there are other countless forms of

vital being. Earth, water, the ducts and fluids of vegetable and of

animal life, the very air we breathe, are peopled by minute organisms

which perform most important functionsin both the living and the

inanimate kingdoms of nature. Of the offices assigned to these

creatures, the most familiar to common observation is the extraction of

lime, and, more rarely, of silex, from the waters inhabited by them, and

the deposit of these minerals in a solid form, either as the material of

their habitations or as the exuviae of their bodies. The microscope and

other means of scientific observation assure us that the chalk-beds of

England and of France, the coral reefs of marine waters in warm

climates, vast calcareous and silicious deposits in the sea and in many

fresh-water ponds, the common polishing earths and slates, and many

species of apparently dense and solid rock, are the work of the humble

organisms of which I speak, often, indeed, of animaculae so small as to

become visible only by the aid of lenses magnifying thousands of times

the linear measures. It is popularly supposed that animalculae, or what

are commonly embraced under the vague name of infusoria, inhabit the

water alone, but naturalists have long known that the atmospheric dust

transported by every wind and deposited by every calm is full of

microscopic life or of its relics. The soil on which the city of Berlin

stands, contains, at the depth of ten or fifteen feet below the surface,

living elaborators of silex; [Footnote: Wittwer, Physikalische

Geographie, p. 142.] and a microscopic examination of a handful of earth

connected with the material evidences of guilt has enabled the

naturalist to point out the very spot where a crime was committed. It

has been computed that one-sixth part of the solid matter let fall by

great rivers at their outlets consists of still recognizable infusory

shells and shields, and, as the friction of rolling water must reduce

many of these fragile structures to a state of comminution which even

the microscope cannot resolve into distinct particles and identify as

relics of animal or of vegetable life, we must conclude that a

considerably larger proportion of river deposits is really the product

of animalcules. [Footnote: To vary the phrase, I make occasional use of

animaloule, 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 a 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.]

It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases mechanical, character

of a great number of the objects important in the material economy of

human life, must be affected by the presence of so large an organic

element in their substance, and it is equally obvious that all

agricultural and all industrial operations tend to disturb the natural

arrangements of this element, to increase or to diminish the special

adaptation of every medium in which it lives to the particular orders of

being inhabited by it. The conversion of woodland into pasturage, of

pasture into plough land, of swamp or of shallow sea into dry ground,

the rotations of cultivated crops, must prove fatal to millions of

living things upon every rood of surface thus deranged by man, and must,

at the same time, more or less fully compensate this destruction of life

by promoting the growth and multiplication of other tribes equally

minute in dimensions. I do not know that man has yet endeavored to avail

himself, by artificial contrivances, of the agency of these wonderful

architects and manufacturers. We are hardly well enough acquainted with

their natural economy to devise means to turn their industry to

profitable account, and they are in very many cases too slow in

producing visible results for an age so impatient as ours. The

over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot wait for wealth to be

amassed by infinitesimal gains, and we are in haste to SPECULATE upon

the powers of nature, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our

trafficking one with another. But there are still some cases where the

little we know of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye,

suggests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of

troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by the

corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near the mouth of

rivers. Hence the change of the outlet of a stream, often a very busy

matter, may promote the construction of a barrier to coast navigation at

one point, and check the formation of a reef at another, by diverting a

current of fresh water from the former and pouring it into the sea at

the latter. Cases may probably be found, in tropical seas, where rivers

have prevented the working of the coral animalcules in straits

separating islands from each other or from the mainland. The diversion

of such streams might remove this obstacle, and reefs consequently be

formed which should convert an archipelago into a single large island,

and finally join that to the neighboring continent. Quatrefages proposed

to destroy the teredo in harbors by impregnating the water with a

mineral solution fatal to them. Perhaps the labors of the coralline

animals might be arrested over a considerable extent of sea-coast by

similar means. The reef-builders are leisurely architects, but the

precious coral is formed so rapidly that the beds may be refished

advantageously as often as once in ten years. [Footnote: The smallest

twig of the precious coral thrown back into the sea attaches itself to

the bottom or a rock, and grows as well as on its native stem. 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. 300, 373.]

It does not seem impossible that branches of this coral might be

attached to the keel of a ship and transplanted to the American coast,

where the Gulf stream would furnish a suitable temperature beyond the

climatic limits that otherwise confine its growth; and thus a new source

of profit might perhaps be added to the scanty returns of the hardy

fisherman. In certain geological formations, the diatomaceae deposit, at

the bottom of fresh-water ponds, beds of silicious shields, valuable as

a material for a species of very light firebrick, in the manufacture of

water-glass and of hydraulic cement, and ultimately, doubtless, in many

yet undiscovered industrial processes. An attentive study of the

conditions favorable to the propagation of the diatomaceae might perhaps

help us to profit directly by the productivity of this organism, and, at

the same time, disclose secrets of nature capable of being turned to

valuable account in dealing with silicious rocks, and the metal which is

the base of them.

Our acquaintance with the obscure and infinitesimal life of which I have

now been treating is very recent, and still very imperfect. We know that

it is of vast importance in geology, but we are so ambitious to grasp

the great, so little accustomed to occupy ourselves with the minute,

that we are not yet prepared to enter seriously upon the question how

far we can control and utilize the operations, not of unembodied

physical forces merely, but of beings, in popular apprehension, almost

as immaterial as they.

Disturbance of Natural Balances.

It is highly probable that the reef-builders and other yet unstudied

minute forms of vital existence have other functions in the economy of

nature besides aiding in the architecture of the globe, and stand in

important relations not only to man but to the plants and the larger

sentient creatures over which he has dominion. The diminution or

multiplication of these unseen friends or foes may be attended with the

gravest consequences to all his material interests, and he is dealing

with dangerous weapons whenever he interferes with arrangements

pre-established by a power higher than his own. The equation of animal

and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence

to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we

produce in the harmonics of nature when we throw the smallest pebble

into the ocean of organic being. This much, however, the facts I have

hitherto presented authorize us to conclude: as often as we destroy the

balance by deranging the original proportions between different orders

of spontaneous life, the law of self-preservation requires us to restore

the equilibrium, by either directly returning the weight abstracted from

one scale, or removing a corresponding quantity from the other. In other

words, destruction must be either repaired by reproduction, or

compensated by new destruction in an opposite quarter. The parlor

aquarium has taught even those to whom it is but an amusing toy, that

the balance of animal and vegetable life must be preserved, and that the

excess of either is fatal to the other, in the artificial tank as well

as in natural waters. A few years ago, the water of the Cochituato

aqueduct at Boston became so offensive in smell and taste as to be quite

unfit for use. Scientific investigation found the cause in the too

scrupulous care with which aquatic vegetation had been excluded from the

reservoir, and the consequent death and decay of the animalculae, which

could not be shut out, nor live in the water without the vegetable

element. [Footnote: It is remarkable that Pulisay, to whose great merits

as an acute observer I am happy to have frequent occasion to bear

testimony, had noticed that vegetation was necessary to maintain the

purity of water in artificial reservoirs, though he mistook the

rationale of its influence, which he ascribed to the elemental "salt"

supposed by him to play an important part in all the operations of

nature. In his treatise upon Waters and Fountains, p. 174, of the

reprint of 1844, he says: "And in special, thou shalt note one point,

the which is understood of few: that is to say, that the leaves of the

trees which fall upon the parterre, and the herbs growing beneath, and

singularly the fruits, if any there be upon the trees, being decayed,

the waters of the parterre shall draw onto them the salt of the said

fruits, leaves, and herbs, the which shall greatly better the water of

thy fountains, and hinder the putrefaction thereof."]

Animalcular Life.

Nature has no unit of magnitude by which she measures her works. Man

takes his standards of dimension from himself. The hair's breadth was

his minimum until the microscope told him that there are animated

creatures to which one of the hairs of his head is a larger cylinder

than is the trunk of the giant California sequoia to him. He borrows his

inch from the breadth of his thumb, his palm and span from the width of

his hand and the spread of his fingers, his foot from the length of the

organ so named; his cubit is the distance from the tip of his middle

finger to his elbow, and his fathom is the space he can measure with his

outstretched arms. [Footnote: The French metrical system seems destined

to be adopted throughout the civilized world. It is indeed recommended

by great advantages, but it is very doubtful whether they are not more

than counterbalanced by the selection of too large a unit of measure,

and by the inherent intractability of all decimal systems with reference

to fractional divisions. The experience of the whole world has

established the superior convenience of a smaller unit, such as the

braccio, the cubit, the foot, and the palm or span, and in practical

life every man finds that he haa much more frequent occasion to use a

fraction than a multiple of the metre. Of course, he must constantly

employ numbers expressive of several centimetres or millimetres instend

of the name of a single smaller unit than the metre. Besides, the metre

is not divisible into twelfths, eighths, sixths, or thirds, or the

multiples of any of these proportions, two of which at least--the eighth

and the third--are of as frequent use as any other fractions. The

adoption of a fourth of the earth's circumference as a base for the new

measures was itself a departure from the decimal system. Had the

Commissioners taken the entire circumference as a base, and divided it

into 100,000,000 instead of 10,000,000 parts, we should have had a unit

of about sixteen inches, which, as a compromise between the foot and the

cubit, would have been much better adapted to universal use than so

large a unit as the metre.] To a being who instinctively finds the

standard of all magnitudes in his own material frame, all objects

exceeding his own dimensions are absolutely great, all falling short of

them absolutely small. Hence we habitually regard the whale and the

elephant as essentially large and therefore important creatures, the

animalcule as an essentially small and therefore unimportant organism.

But no geological formation owes its origin to the labors or the remains

of the huge mammal, while the animalcule composes, or has furnished, the

substance of strata thousands of feet in thickness, and extending, in

unbroken beds, over many degrees of terrestrial surface. If man is

destined to inhabit the earth much longer, and to advance in natural

knowledge with the rapidity which has marked his progress in physical

science for the last two or three centuries, he will learn to put a

wiser estimate on the works of creation, and will derive not only great

instruction from studying the ways of nature in her obscurest, humblest

walks, but great material advantage from stimulating her productive

energies in provinces of her empire hitherto regarded as forever

inaccessible, utterly barren. [Footnote: The fermentation of liquids,

and in many cases the decomposition of semi-solids, formerly supposed to

be owing purely to chemical action, are now ascribed by many chemists to

vital processes of living minute organisms, both vegetable and animal,

and consequently to physiological as well as to chemical forces. Even

alcohol is stated to be an animal product. The whole subject of

animalcular, or rather minute organic, life, has assumed a now and

startling importance from the recent researches of naturalists and

physiologists, in the agency of such life, vegetable or animal, in

exciting and communicating contagious diseases, and it is extremely

probable that what are vaguely called germs, to whichever of the organic

kingdoms they may be assigned, creatures inhabiting various media, and

capable of propagating their kind and rapidly multiplying, are the true

seeds of infection and death in the maladies now called zymotic, as well

perhaps as in many others.

The literature of this subject is now very voluminous. For observations

with high microscopic power on this subject, see Beale, Disease Germs,

their supposed Nature, and Disease Germs, their real Nature, both

published in London in 1870.