DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 105 



prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as they 

 feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are hmited by the de- 

 mauds of i^resent appetite, and they do not wastefully destroy 

 what they can not consume. Man, on the contrary, angles to-day 

 that he may dine to-morrow ; he takes and dries mUHons of fish 

 on the banks of Newfoundland and the coast of Norway, that the 

 fervent CathoHc of the shores of the Mediterranean may have 

 wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the stomach during next 

 year's Lent, without violating the discipHne of the Romish 

 church ; * and all the arrangements of his fisheries are so organ- 

 ized as to involve the destruction of many more fish than are 

 secm*ed for human use, and the loss of a large proportion of the 

 annual harvest of the sea in the process of curing, or in trans- 

 portation to the places of its consumption.f The Atlantic salmon, 



bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Tea 

 thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has some- 

 times taken 200,000 in a day. — Dwight's Travels, ii., pp. 513, 515. These 

 numbers, however, sink almost into insignificance before the statements made 

 by Prof. Goode of the Smithsonian in regard to the menhaden fisheries of the 

 United States. According to him this fish excels all others as a bait fish, and 

 in 1877 the total consumption of menhaden for this purpose did not fall below 

 26,000,000 fish. Ten years before, when the entire mackerel fleet was fishing 

 with hooks, the consumption was much greater. In 1878, the menhaden oil 

 and guano industry employed capital to the amount of $2,350,000, 3,337 men, 

 64 steamers, 279 sailing vessels, and consumed 777,000,000 fish. These esti- 

 mates do not include the quantities applied directly to the soil, nor those used 

 for food, many thousands of barrels being salted down for domestic use or 

 for exportation. It may be fairly inferred, from the statistics given by Prof. 

 Goode, that not less than a thousand million of these fish are now taken yearly 

 on our coast. 



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 English 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. 



f 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- 

 5* 



