Trout and Salmon 193 



men from the mouth of the Columbia to Sitka, Alaska, are 

 Columbia River salmon. And it was found that salmon 

 tagged all at one spot in the ocean turned up in widely 

 separate streams at spawning time. 



All of which the skeptics agreed was most interesting in 

 showing that some fish did go to distant places in the sea, but 

 failed to agree that it proved anything about "homing." 

 That a salmon which was caught and tagged in the ocean 

 later came to spawn in a stream hundreds of miles away 

 failed to demonstrate, they claimed — and quite logically — 

 that it had been born in that stream. The total number of 

 fish tagged was but a fraction of all the salmon in the seas 5 

 it might be that all the tagged ones were strays. It might 

 be that the fish which were marked by fin removal before 

 they left their native streams and which later did return 

 there to spawn, never got beyond the continental shelf and 

 the influence of their own streams, and that the others which 

 went further and which were tagged with numbered disks 

 far at sea, never did get home, but became the strays. For 

 conclusive proof, it would be necessary for a little fish to be 

 marked by fin removal with its proper address before it left 

 home, to be recaptured far away in the ocean by one of the 

 interested agencies and numbered with a tag, and then to 

 return to its own stream and have the fortune to fall into the 

 hands of someone who would recognize the importance of 

 both the missing fins and the tag. That such a series of 

 coincidences could occur outside of fiction seemed, by the 

 laws of combination and permutation, of a likelihood so re- 

 mote as to be for all practical purposes impossible. 



And yet the impossible did occur. In 1938 a young Atlantic 

 salmon had its adipose fin removed on its way down the 

 Northeast Margaree River, Cape Breton Island, to the ocean. 

 In June of 1940 this fish was captured off Bonavista on the 

 east coast of Newfoundland, 550 miles away by sea. It was 



