Sa 
108 DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS, 
more fish than are secured for human use, and the loss of a 
large proportion of the annual harvest of the sea in the process 
of curing, or in transportation to the places of its consumption.* 
Fish are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even 
imperceptible differences in their breeding places and feeding 
grounds. Every river, every brook, every lake stamps a special 
character upon its salmon, its shad, and its trout, which is at 
once recognized by those who deal in or consume them. No 
skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and prepared 
by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the table of 
nature, and the trout of the artificial ponds in Germany and 
Switzerland are so inferior to the brook-fish of the same species 
and climate, that it is hard to believe them identical. The 
superior sapidity of the American trout and other fresh-water 
fishes to the most nearly corresponding European species, which 
is familiar to every one acquainted with both continents, is 
probably due less to specific difference than to the fact that, 
even in the parts of the New World which have been longest 
cultivated, wild nature is not yet tamed down to the character 
it has assumed in the Old, and which it will acquire in America 
also when her civilization shall be as ancient as is now that of 
Europe. 
* According to Berthelot, in the Gulf of Lyons, between Marseilles and the 
easternmost spur of the Pyrenees, about 5,000,000 small fish are taken: an- 
nually with the drag-net, and not less than twice as many more, not to speak 
of spawn, are destroyed by the use of this net. 
Between 1861 and 1865 France imported from Norway, for use as bait in 
the sardine fishery, cod-roes to the value of three million francs,—CuTtTs, 
Report on Commerce in the Products of the Sca, 1872, p. 82. 
The most reckless waste of aquatic life I remember to have seen noticed, if 
we except the destruction of herring and other fish with spawn, is that of the 
eggs of the turtle in the Amazon for the sake of the oil extracted from them. 
Bates estimates the eggs thus annually sacrificed at 48,000,000.— Naturalist on 
the Amazon, 2d edition, 1864, p. 365. 
+ It is possible that time may modify the habits of the fresh-water fish of 
the North American States, and accommodate them to the new physical con- 
ditions of their native waters. Hence it may be hoped that nature, even un- 
aided by art, will do something towards restoring the ancient plenty of our 
lakes and rivers. The decrease of our fresh-water fish cannot be ascribed 
