88 FISH HARVESTING. 



much fuel is needed, and that of a sort that will 

 not keep up a large fire. Man, therefore, wears 

 clothes made from a vegetable fibre, and eats 

 fruit and rice, the lowest in the scale of h.eat- 

 making materials. Far north among the polar 

 ice, where you cannot touch metal without its 

 taking the skin off your fingers, the human 

 locomotive is protected by thick coverings of 

 fur : the native takes the jackets from his furry- 

 footed companions, and covers his own skin with 

 them. But the grand oil-springs the locomo- 

 tive's necessary coal-mines in another form are 

 in the bodies of the great seals and whales. Oil 

 and blubber burn rapidly, and give out a large 

 amount of heat. With a fur-suit outside, and 

 inside a feed of seal's flesh washed down with 

 seal's oil, the steam of life is kept up very easily. 

 But all the fat of the sea is not in the bodies of 

 those great blubbering whales and seals. There 

 is a fish, small in size, not larger than a smelt, 

 that is fat beyond all description, clad in glit- 

 tering silver armour, and found on the coasts 

 of British Columbia, Russian America, Queen 

 Charlotte and Vancouver Islands, which is called 

 by the natives Eulachon or Candle-fish. I have 

 had both leisure and opportunity to make this 

 fish's intimate acquaintance; played the spy 



