TEE RETURN OF SALMON. 49 



perhaps more exaggeration. I noticed that the Chilcoot fish seemed 

 deeper in body than those at Chilcat. The red salmon becomes 

 compressed before spawning, and the Chilcoot fishes having a short 

 run spawn earlier than the Chilcat fishes, which have many miles to 

 go, the water being perhaps warmer at the mouth of the river which 

 flows farthest from the parent ice-fields. The riper fishes run up the 

 shorter river. In Bristol Bay, according to Dr. Gilbert, the great runs 

 ascend sometimes one river, sometimes another. Perhaps some locali- 

 ties may meet the nervous reactions of small fishes while not attracting 

 the large ones. In Necker Bay a few full-grown salmon run besides 

 the little ones. A few dwarf individuals, two and three year olds, 

 ripened prematurely, run in every salmon stream. These little fishes 

 are nearly all males. Mr. H. S. Davis well observes that 'until a con- 

 stant difference has been demonstrated by a careful examination of large 

 numbers of fish from each stream taken at the same time, but little 

 weight can be attached to arguments of this nature.' 



It is doubtless true as a general proposition that nearly all 

 salmon return to the region in which they were spawned. Most of them 

 apparently never go far away from the mouth of the stream or the 

 bay into which it flows. It is true that salmon are occasionally taken 

 well out at sea and it is certain that the red salmon runs of Puget 

 Sound come from outside the Straits of Fuca. There is, however, 

 evidence that most species rarely go so far as that. When seeking 

 shore, they usually reach the original channels. 



In 1880, the writer, studying the king salmon of the Columbia, 

 used the following words, which he has not had occasion to change : 



It is the prevailing impression that the salmon have some special instinct 

 which leads them to return to spawn in the same spawning grounds where they 

 were originally hatched. We fail to find any evidence of this in the case of 

 the Pacific coast salmon, and we do not believe it to be true. It seems more 

 probable that the young salmon hatched in any river mostly remain in the 

 ocean within a radius of twenty, thirty or forty miles of its mouth. These, in 

 their movement about in the ocean may come into contact with the cold waters 

 of their parent rivers, or perhaps of any other river, at a considerable distance 

 from the shore. In the case of the quinnat and the blueback, their * instinct ' 

 seems to lead them to ascend these fresh waters, and in a majority of cases 

 these waters will be those in which the fishes in question were originally 

 spawned. Later in the season the growth of the reproductive organs leads 

 them to approach the shore and search for fresh waters, and still the chances 

 are that they may find the original stream. But undoubtedly many fall salmon 

 ascend, or try to ascend, streams in which no salmon was ever hatched. In 

 little brooks about Puget Sound, where the water is not three inches deep, are 

 often found dead or dying salmon, which have entered them for the purpose 

 of spawning. It is said of the Russian River and other California rivers, that 

 their mouths, in the time of low water in summer, generally become entirely 

 closed by sand-bars, and that the salmon, in their eagerness to ascend them, 

 frequently fling themselves entirely out of water on the beach. But this does 



VOL. LXIV. — 4. 



