210, THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



day and night, when the sun goes away for months, the men sail reck- 

 lessly in their boats and canoes to their anchoring-places far up in the 

 north, and their spacious houses are quickly filled with guests. Obey- 

 ing the resistless drift, come hosts of fishes out of the deepest deeps 

 of the sea, so that the net cast for them mocks the strength of the 

 Herculean men, or is torn under the burden. The throng of the fool- 

 ish fish is so dense that an oar pushed perpendicularly through it re- 

 mains upright. Millions are caught, and millions go on, so that there 

 is no sign of a decrease in the number. This migration of the fishes 

 reaches its extreme point at about Christmas-time. No pencil could 

 reproduce the picture which the polar sea exhibits at this season. Hun- 

 dreds of craft, manned with stalwart fishers, are being incessantly filled 

 with speckled prey ; as far as the eye can reach, nothing but fish, 

 which crowd and press upon one another to get to the breeding-place ; 

 the massive glaciers and rock-built shores in the background, and, as 

 illuminants to the scene, the ghostly moon and the crackling northern 

 lights. All this time there is also twilight on the southern horizon, 

 and toward February a narrow strip of the sun shows itself again, 

 gradually to rise higher. With the first appearance of day the fishes 

 begin to sink slowly in the fathomless depths. As the sky becomes 

 brighter, the sea and its bays become more quiet. The boats cease 

 to glide over the surface of the waters, the fishermen go home with 

 their spoil, and the northern world lies silent, basking in the beams 

 of the returning sun. But this quiet only lasts for a few weeks, 

 when new noisy, swarming hosts come to the islands. They are the 

 birds, which come up from the sea to the land. It is a deeply poetic 

 trait in the lives of these creatures that only two causes determine 

 them to seek terra Jirma — the power of love and the approach of 

 death. The sea-bird, weather-proof, lives on the sea. He hunts his 

 food by diving, swinging over the billows, and sleeps and dreams with 

 his head hidden under his wings. But there comes a time when the 

 earlier sunbeams kiss the northern islands ; then he is mightily moved 

 in his soul, and hastens to the coast to celebrate there his annual wed- 

 ding. And, when he feels that death is near, he swims with his feeble 

 limbs back to the place of his birth, there to close his life. It is the 

 same feeling that inspires in aged men that ardent desire to return to 

 their old home to die and be buried there. To the naturalist who goes 

 to the north to study the ways of the birds this trait in their character 

 is of peculiar interest. Of one of the tribes of these colonists of the 

 northern bird-mountain I must make particular mention. It is the eider- 

 duck, the producer of down. It belongs to the family of the ducks, 

 and forms, so far as bodily stature is concerned, one of the largest 

 species of the group. The plumage of the male is handsome and brill- 

 iant. In it black, red, ashen-gray, ice-green, white, brown, and yellow 

 are mingled with splendid effect. His head and back are snow-white, 

 his neck is rose-red, and the lower part of his body is deep black. The 



