450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of herring arrested in liis career. And the trawling, instead of injur- 

 ing the herring, captured and removed hosts of their worst enemies. 

 That is how " it stood to reason " when one got to the bottom of the 

 matter. 



I do not think that any one who looks carefully into the subject 

 will arrive at any other conclusion than that reached by my colleagues 

 and myself : namely, that the best thing for governments to do in 

 relation to the herring-fisheries is, to let them alone, except in so 

 far as the police of the sea is concerned. With this proviso, let peo- 

 ple fish how they like, as they like, and when they like. At present, 

 I must repeat the conviction we expressed so many years ago, that 

 there is not a particle of evidence that anything man does has an 

 appreciable influence on the stock of herrings. It will be time to 

 meddle when any satisfactory evidence that mischief is being done is 

 produced. Nature. 



^*^ 



PHYSICAL EDUCATIO^^ 



Br FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 

 RECREATIOlSr. 



"Mirth is a remedy." Thoma.s Hobbes. 



HAPPINESS is the normal condition of every living creature, for 

 in a state of nature every normal function is connected with a 

 pleasurable sensation. " To enjoy is to obey " ; if human life were 

 what it could be and what its Author intended it to be, the path of duty 

 would be a flowery path, the reward of virtue would not be a crown of 

 thorns ; man, like all his fellow-creatures, would attain to his highest 

 well-being by simply following the promptings of his instincts. Wild 

 animals have not lost their earthly paradise ; he who has observed 

 them in the freedom of their forest homes can not doubt that to them 

 existence is a blessing, and death merely the later or earlier evening 

 of a happy day. Nor would our missionaries find it easy to persuade 

 an able-bodied savage that earth is a vale of tears, till fire-water and 

 fire-arms demonstrate the superiority of revelation over the light of 

 nature. The children of the wilderness need no holidays ; to them life 

 itself is a festival and earth a play-ground for manifold games, not the 

 less entertaining for being sometimes spiced with danger or j^rompted 

 by hunger and thirst. 



But in process of time the daily life of a combatant in the harder 

 and harder struggle for existence became so joyless and wearisome 

 that the clamors of an unsatisfied instinct su^cjested the institution of 

 periodical festivals : pleasure-days intended to offset the tedium of 

 monotonous toil, as gymnastic exercises tend to counteract the influ- 



