34 SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 



all was formed, had He pleased, could have supplied food for 

 those fishes in the seas around our coasts : so He could to the 

 migratory tribes of birds in the parts from whence they come ; 

 but then, what would become of the migratory system, which, 

 as we have said, forms so curious and so beautiful a link in 

 the order of the creation? Of what use, too, would those 

 inhospitable regions, the Polar seas, be, abounding in fish 

 doomed to remain there as mere food for seals? To send 

 ships to such a distance, to fish for small fishes amid moun- 

 tains of ice, would be out of the question. While, therefore, 

 other seas facilitate the intercourse between distant nations, 

 and thus render the various productions of the earth common 

 to all, the Polar Sea has its use, as a great nursery or magazine 

 of fishes, which, by the migratory system, are brought regularly 

 within the reach of man, the means of supplying whose wants 

 forms so prominent a feature in the works of creation. 



Let us follow up this system a little further. We have 

 already remarked that the same habits and instincts are uni- 

 formly found to pervade the same species of animals throughout 

 the whole of the animal creation. A dog, or a cat, or a spar- 

 row, in Spain or in Eussia, or a crow, which is found in so 

 many parts of the globe, differs in no respect, in its habits and 

 instincts in those countries, from the same animal in Great 

 Britain ; and as a thrush builds its nest in the Hebrides, so 

 exactly does another thrush in Cornwall. This uniformity of 

 instinct in the same species of animals, in all parts, appears, 

 therefore, to be a general law of nature ; and we will venture 

 to say, that however they may differ in size, shape, or quality 

 (as is the case in our own rivers), there is no difference what- 

 ever, in point of habits and instincts, between a salmon in 

 Kamschatka and one in the Tweed every individual of the 

 species being influenced by the same instincts, and subject to 

 the same laws. If, then, all the salmon, and all the herrings 

 belonging to Great Britain are forced, by the law of their 

 nature, to perform a migration to the Polar Sea, the salmon 

 and herrings of the Baltic,* of North America, and Kams- 



* In Sweden the general opinion is, that all their herrings come from the 

 Polar Sea. Cox's Travels. 



