458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In the Gibbon River the cataracts have proved to the trout an 

 impassable barrier ; but, strangely enough, its despised associate, 

 the sluggish, chunky blob, a little soft-bodied, smooth, black, tad- 

 pole-like fellow, with twinkling eyes and a voracious appetite— 

 a fish who can not leap at all— has crossed this barrier. Hundreds 

 of blob live under the stones in the upper reaches of the stream, 

 the only fish in the Gibbon waters. There he is, and it is a stand- 

 ing puzzle even to himself to know how he got there. We might 

 imagine, perhaps, that some far-off ancestor, some ancient Queen 

 of the Blobs, was seized by an osprey and carried away in the 

 air. Perhaps an eagle was watching and forced the osprey to 

 give up its prey. Perhaps in the struggle the blob escaped, fall- 

 ing into the river above the falls, to form the beginning of the 

 future colony. At any rate, there is the great impassable water- 

 fall, the blob above it and below. The osprey has its nest on a 

 broken pine tree above the cataract, and its tyrant master, the 

 bald eagle, watches it from some still higher crag whenever it 

 goes fishing. 



Two years ago the Hon. Marshall McDonald, whose duty as 

 United States Fish Commissioner it is to look after the fishes 

 wherever they may be, sent me to this country to see what could 

 be done for his wards. It was a proud day when I set out from 

 Mammoth Hot Springs astride a black cay use, or Indian pony, 

 which answered to the name of Jump, followed by a long train of 

 sixteen other cay uses of every variety of color and character, the 

 most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some 

 remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and 

 killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, 

 as in the old Norse legends, she had inherited his strength, his 

 wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I 

 came back from this strange land and told the story of its fishes, 

 other men were sent out from Washington with nets and buckets! 

 They gathered up the trout and carried them to the rivers above 

 the falls, and now all the brooks and pools of the old lava-bed, 

 the fairest streams in the world, are full of their natural inhab- 

 itants. 



Mentioninct some peculiarities in the distribution of plants in Great Britain— 

 that it has a southern flora opposite France, a Germanic flora on the east coast, a 

 Lusitanian flora in the southwest, and on the extreme west two American plants 

 unknown elsewhere in Europe— Mr. Clement Eeid expresses the belief that in the 

 Britain of the present day we may study the repeopling of a country over which 

 everything has been exterminated, and, until we have fuller direct evidence of the 

 stages of the process, we may safely accept Greenland and Britain as illustrating 

 the way in which Nature works to fill gaps in the fauna and flora, whether these 

 are caused by changes of climate, by volcanic agency, or by the submergence and 

 reappearance of islands. 



