1903 The Spring Awakening of the Sea 109 



and mackerel fleets would be hard pat to it to know when to 

 fit out each season. As it is, the new-barked fleets of nets 

 are put on board the smacks and luggers at much the same 

 time every spring, and the boats fare forth on the high seas 

 with some reasonable hope of encountering the advancing 

 shoals much where and when they were encountered the 

 year before. 



The objects of migration are as obscure among fishes as 

 they are among birds. It requires no very powerful im- 

 agination to appreciate the reasons which prompt our 

 winter visitors, the ducks and geese, to fly south of their 

 frozen-out feeding-grounds in the arctic circle, and spend 

 the rest of the winter on the more promising feeding-grounds 

 off our own coasts. The causes of the visits of our summer- 

 visiting birds, of the cuckoo and the nightingale, are, and 

 must for the present remain, a mystery. Whether our 

 islands fulfil their ideal of a summer residence, and, if so, 

 why ? — these are questions which no one has successfully 

 answered. There is no question of food, because both insect 

 and vegetable food is usually more abundant in summer in 

 their native winter lands than with us. That the temperate 

 British climate may be more suitable for the rearing of 

 healthy families is quite conceivable, but the reasons for 

 such a recommendation are far from obvious. These 

 reasons for migration, already so obscure in connection 

 with winged travellers, become altogether unfathomable in 

 their application to fishes. So unnecessary, on the face of 

 it, does this spring inshoring seem to that class of animals, 

 many of which even spawn in the colder months and not in 

 April and May at all, that we may well forgive the un- 

 scientific but pious naturalists of other centuries, who took 

 the anthropocentric view of these blessings and vowed 

 reverently that Providence, which always had a special eye 

 for the benefits of the British realm, ordained of set purpose 

 these inshorings to provide abundance of food. It might 

 occur to some that this view is a little weakened by the 

 absence of a counsel of perfection in these arrangements, for 

 it is an undeniable fact that, by the existing scheme of 

 migrations in the sea, those species — like mackerel and red 

 mullet — which decay most rapidly in hot weather, are most 



