THE TUNNY. 221 
swelling as it were with living waves, not seldom overflows 
its banks and casts multitudes ashore. Steller affirms that, 
in that almost uninhabited peninsula, the bears and dogs and 
other animals catch more of these fishes with their mouths 
and feet than man in other countries with all his cunning 
devices of net and angle. 
The salmon of Iceland, which formerly remained undisturbed 
by the phlegmatic inhabitants, are now caught in large numbers 
for the British market. A small river, bearing the significant 
name of Laxaa or Salmon river, has been rented for the trifling 
sum of 100/. a year by an English company which sends every 
spring its agents to the spot, well provided with the best fishing 
apparatus. The captured fish are immediately boiled and her- 
metically packed in tin boxes, so that they can be eaten in 
London almost as fresh as if they had just been caught. Other 
valuable salmon-streams in Iceland and Norway pay us asimilar 
tribute ; and as commerce, aided by the steamboat and the rail- 
way, extends her empire, rivers more and more distant are made 
to supply the deficiencies of our native streams. More than 
150,000 salmon are annually caught in Aljaska—not a quarter 
of a century ago a real “ultima Thule”—and after having been 
well pickled and smoked at the various fishing-stations are 
chiefly sent from Sitcha to Hamburg. 
Nature has denied the salmon to the streams of Australia 
and New Zealand; but as the eggs of this fish can be preserved 
for a very long time, they have been transported with perfect 
success to those far-distant colonies. 
If neither the salmon, nor the common herring, nor the cod, 
dwell in the Mediterranean, the fishermen of that sea rejoice 
in the capture of the Tunny, the 
chief of the mackerel or scomberoid 
family. Its usual length is about two 
feet, but it sometimes grows to eight or 
ten; and Pennant saw one killed in 
1769, when he was at Inverary, that 
weighed 460 pounds. The flesh is as firm as that of the 
sturgeon, but of a finer flavour. 
“In May and June,” says Mr. Yarrell, “the adult fish rove 
along the coast of the Mediterranean in large shoals and triangular 
array. ‘They are extremely timid, and easily induced to take a 
