DESTEUCTION OF FISH. 99 



the civilized world by a judicious administration of the resources 

 of the waters, would allow some restriction of the amount of 

 soil at present employed for agricultural purposes, and a corre- 

 sponding extension of the area of the forest, and would thus 

 facihtate a return to primitive geographical arrangements which 

 it is important partially to restore. 



Destruction of Fish. 



The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure from 

 human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibihty of their re- 

 treats, and by our ignorance of their habits — a natural result of 

 the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living in a 

 medium in which we can not exist. Human agency has, never- 

 theless, both directly and incidentally, produced great changes in 

 the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, and if the 

 effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are apparently of small 

 importance in general geography, they are still not wliolly inap- 

 preciable. The great diminution in the abundance of the larger 

 fish employed for food, or pursued for products useful in the 

 arts, is famihar, and when we consider how the vegetable and 

 animal life on which they feed must be affected by the reduction 

 of their numbers, it is easy to see that their destniction may in- 

 volve considerable modifications in many of the material arrange- 

 ments of nature. The whale * does not appear to have been an 

 object of pursuit by the ancients, for any purpose, nor do we 

 know when the whale fishery first commenced. It was, however, 

 very actively prosecuted in the Middle Ages, and the Biscayans 

 seem to have been particularly successful in this as indeed in 



* I use whale not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the largo 

 inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name. 



The Greek Kfj-oq and the Latin Balsena, though sometimes, especially in 

 later classical writers, specifically applied to time cetaceans, were generally 

 much more comprehensive in their signification than the modern word whale. 

 This appears abundantly from the enumeration of the marine animals em- 

 braced by Oppian under the name /c7;ro?, in the first book of the HaUeutica. 



There is some confusion in Oppian's account of the fishery of the KfjToq in 

 the fifth book of the Halieutica. Part of it is probably to be understood of 

 cetaceans which have grounded, as some species often do ; but in general it 

 evidently applies to the taking of large fish — sharks, for example, as appears 

 by the description of the teeth — with hook and bait. 



