DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 107 
on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby com- 
pensated his own greater destructiveness.* The bird and beast 
of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as 
they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are limited by 
the demands of present appetite, and they do not wastefully 
destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the contrary, 
angles to-day that he may dine to-morrow ; he takes and dries 
millions of fish on the banks of Newfoundland and the coast of 
Norway, that the fervent Catholic of the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the 
stomach during next year’s Lent, without violating the disci- 
pline of the papal church ;}+ and all the arrangements of his 
fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of many 
* According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, 
three thousand herring busses, and nine thousand vessels engaged in the trans- 
port of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed in the 
Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000. 
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most success- 
fully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg alone 
exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a total of 
about 164,000,000 ; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, from this keen 
pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the exportation of 
them altogether—Das Leben des Meeres, p. 182. 
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or almost enough to 
supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe. 
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring too 
bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten 
thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has some- 
times taken 200,000 in a day.—Dwicut’s T7avels, ii., pp. 512, 515. 
The London Times of May 11, 1872, informs us that 1,100 tons of mackerel 
estimated to weigh one pound each had recently been taken in a single night 
at a fishing station on the British coast. 
About ten million eels are sold annually in Billingsgate market, but vastly 
greater numbers of the young fry, when but three or four inches long, are 
taken. So abundant are they at the mouths of many French and [nglish 
rivers, that they are carried into the country by cart-loads, and not only 
eaten, but given to swine or used as manure. 
+ The fisheries of Sicily alone are said to yield 20,000 tons of tunny a year, 
The tunny is principally consumed in Italy during Lent, and a large propor- 
tion of the twenty millions of codfish taken annually at the Lofoden fishery 
on the coast of Norway is exported to the Mediterranean, 
