MALACOPTERYGII ABDOM1NALES. 475 



thousands of them will be brought up along with it. The 

 herrings follow them wherever they are driven by the wind 

 and current, and this sort of aliment communicates to their 

 belly and to their excrements a red tint, which appears owing, 

 according to M. Strcem, to a humour contained in the eyes of 

 these Crustacea. Many persons have also attributed to the 

 herrings which feed upon them certain deleterious properties, 

 and regard them as one of the causes of some diseases which 

 afflict the inhabitants of the North. But this is probably an 

 error. We are assured, however, that putrefaction very 

 speedily occurs in those herrings which have been taken at 

 the moment when their intestines were filled with these 

 animals. 



Each year, in summer and autumn, these celebrated fishes 

 proceed from the North, and arrive on the western coasts of 

 Europe in innumerable legions, or rather in crowded shoals 

 of an immense extent. They also spread themselves over cer- 

 tain shores of America, and on the northern coasts of Asia. 

 It is generally believed, and the idea has been remarkably 

 accredited by Anderson, that they withdraw at certain periods 

 into the regions of the Polar Circle, to seek an asylum under 

 the ice of the northern seas, and that not finding food there 

 in proportion to their prodigious numbers, they send forth 

 colonies, in the commencement of every spring, towards more 

 southern shores. Some naturalists have gone so far as to trace 

 the route which those migrations follow, and represent them 

 as divided into two troops, innumerable detachments from 

 which cover the surface of the seas to a considerable dis- 

 tance. One of these great columns, according to them, crowds 

 round the coasts of Iceland, and spreading beyond Newfound- 

 land, proceeds to fill the gulfs and bays of the American con- 

 tinent ; the other descends along Norway, and sends a detach- 

 ment into the Baltic, while the remainder, making the tour of 



