267 



reads like a California exaggeration, but is from thoroughly accredited and at- 

 tested sources of information. This is what the state commissioner writes under 

 date of ]2th November, 1890 :— 



" If I were to say that our shad, which were planted here Home ten or more 

 years ago, are the commonest fish in the market, as well as the cheapest, it would 

 be doubted, and if I said that the shad during the spawning season come into our 

 trout streams, many miles from salt waters, in such numbers that barrels of them 

 might be taken with the aid of a pitchfork, (that would be called a California 

 story), nevertheless it w^ould be a true one. No one away from here can appre- 

 ciate the extent to which the carp, shad, and catfish have increased in our waters. 

 I can well remember, and not so very long ago, when I paid $1.50 for a pound of 

 shad. To-day you can get an eight-pound shad for 50 cents." 



But this is not the only point of interest about the shad of the Pacific. Be- 

 fore the experiments were made there, it was a dictum that fish planted in a river 

 would return to it when mature for the purpose of spawning. But the California 

 experiments have demonstrated that this instinct of nativity, should it really 

 exist, is, in this case, dominated by other influences, which have dispersed the 

 shad planted in the Sacramento widely beyond the limits which had been 

 assigned to them and in a most unexpected direction. 



The reason for this is probably to be found in the general influences of the 

 Japan current, which brings the warmth of equatorial Asia to temper the ex- 

 tremes of Arctic climate on the southern shores of the Alaskan peninsula, and 

 thence sweeping to the south, carries tropical heats to the latitude of San Fran- 

 cises. Repelled on one hand by the low temperature of the great rivers and 

 fringe of coast waters, and solicited on the other by the equable and higher 

 temperature of the Japan current, the shad have become true nomads, and have 

 broken the bounds of the hydrographic area to which we had supposed they 

 would be restricted. Following the track of the Asiatic current, and finding 

 more congenial temperature as they progress, it is not unreasonable to expect that 

 some colonies will eventually reach the coast of Asia, and establish themselves in 

 its fifreat rivers. 



