322 THE UNIVERSE. 



jection, several instances of such a fact have been cited. 

 Authors mention showers of sticklebacks, certainly among 

 the smallest of their kind, which live in the pools and 

 streams of our country districts. These fish, pumped up 

 along with the water of some fen by the suction of a water- 

 spout, have been seen to fall in heaps at great distances 

 from the place whence they were lifted. 



Thus modern science has established the reality of a phe- 

 nomenon advanced by antiquity, and the strangeness of 

 which caused men for a long time to doubt it. 1 



Among the fish there are some the migrations of which 

 have acquired great celebrity, especially those of the her- 

 ring. It is thought that the northern seas ought to be 

 considered as the favorite residence of their innumerable 

 cohorts, and that it is from thence that the long bands start 

 which annually bear to Europe so much food, and give such 

 an impulse to maritime commerce. Their extreme fecun- 

 dity alone explains how these fish subsist, in spite of the 

 enormous consumption of them during so many ages. When 

 their wandering masses issue from the Polar seas, they are 

 said to divide into two columns. One of these advances to- 



1 Among the writers of antiquity who mention showers of frogs we may men- 

 tion Elian, on whose back one fell as he was travelling from Naples to Pozzuoli. 



The showers of fish which have been the subject of discussion were made up 

 of very small species, which, like frogs, sometimes swarm to an extraordinary ex- 

 tent in the fens, so much so that cart-loads of them are taken away to manure 

 the ground and feed the cattle with. Those naturalists who, like Messrs. Defrance 

 and H. Cloquet, maintained that showers of toads ought to be ranked among 

 popular errors thought that these batrachians, which sometimes appear in such 

 multitudes after a heavy shower that it is impossible to set one's foot down with- 

 out crushing some of them, were made up of the young which had lain hidden in 

 the clefts of the dry ground, and had been driven out by the rain. 



