THE ANIMAL KINGDOM 



323 



wards Iceland, and skirts the shore of America ; the other 

 takes an opposite direction along the broken shores of Nor- 

 way, and furnishes a branch to the Baltic, whilst the mass 

 spreads out on the coasts of France and Great Britain. The 

 route is so regular that some authors have ventured to 



150. Stickleback in its Nest: Gasterosteus trachurus. 



trace it out on the geographical charts which accompany 

 their works. 1 



1 We do not wish to call in question an opinion which is widely spread among 

 fishermen, but we must say that these migrations are very doubtful. Two of the 

 most celebrated ichthyologists of our epoch, Bloch and Noel, deny these extraor- 

 dinary migrations of the herring. It is supposed, perhaps on better grounds, 

 that this fish always haunts the places where it is seen only at a certain period of 

 the year, but that it lives at the deepest parts of the sea, and only comes to the 

 surface at the period of reproduction, and for a short time. 



Fishing in these shoals of herring began at a very remote period. In the chron- 

 icles of the monastery of Evesham, which date from the becinnin"- of the eighth 



