PROCEEDINGS OF UNITED CTATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 79 



where tliere is the same or greater drainage, yet no such trouble Iniowu; 

 or of the Withlacoochee, Suwauee, and a dozeu other streams draining 

 swamps like the Ofeekiuofee, iu whose tangled recesses grow idauts as 

 noxious as those farther south, yet whose discharging currents do no 

 harm to the iishes ? Moreover, in the Manatee River itself no iish were 

 killed above the free range of the tides, though daily breasting the 

 swamp overflow. 



Some, discarding- any theory of the decoction of poison from jdants as 

 an explanation, will tell you that the excess of rainwater discharged by 

 the rivers so freshened the surf as to cause the death of all shoreswim- 

 ming tishes. This, as near as I can make it out, is Mr. Moore's exi>la- 

 uation of the mortality at Egmont Key. 



In a few confined spots, where tishes could not escape at will, this 

 might now and then cause a death; but it is notorious that the fishes 

 of the Gulf coast make little or no distinction between salt and fresh 

 water. Alligators swim to the outermost keys, and the best sheeps- 

 head caught are those far up the Caloosahatchie, sn here the stream is 

 always sweet, while the porpoise and shark chase the mullet away iu 

 toward the head of the bayous, or until the river-channel gets too shal- 

 low lor them to swim farther. A little fresh water, or a good deal, 

 more or less, would receive no attention whatever from a Floridan fish. 

 The Mississippi has been deluging the Gulf with a well-nigh Amazonian 

 volume of water, fresh not only, but thick and nasty, yet no one sup- 

 1 loses the fishes off the delta are obliged to stay iu its murky flood unless 

 they choose, or, if they do, that they suffer by it, except to the palate 

 of the epicure. 



But a more cogent argument, from facts perhaps overlooked hereto- 

 fore, exists against any theory which seeks to explain the destruction of 

 marine life inside the Florida reefs by any landward agency. This is 

 that it was in all cases the dwellers on the bottom that i^erished first, 

 while the surface-feeders were the last to be affected, and as a rule 

 escaped altogether. (Until 1880, I was told, no mullets were ever 

 known to be killed.) It was the death of sponges, conchs, sea-anemones, 

 crawling horseshoe-crabs, of toad-fish, cow-fish, skates, and the like, 

 which keep close down on the bottom, that first apprised the fisher- 

 men of the presence of their dreaded and mysterious enemy. IsText 

 came the bodies of red-fish, groupers, pompanos, and other deep swim- 

 mers, and last of all a ivw mullets and sharks. Fresh water, tinctured 

 with tannin or untinctured, would not effect this. It would float on the 

 surface, having a lesser density. If it exerted a noxious influence it 

 would be the surface-life that would first sucmmb, the bottom-life long- 

 est escape. But quite the reverse has been the case, and this, with 

 other appearances, leads to the conclusion that the "poison" springs 

 from the bottom of the sea, or is formed in its waters. 



The only way to account for this is by supposing that eruptions of 

 volcanic gases may have taken place through the bottom of the sea 



