36 CARIBOU SHOOTING IN NEWFOUNDLAND. 



to make up this weight of dried fish, allowing fifty to 

 a quintal, would be 185,000,000; and yet this enor- 

 mous annual draft on these extensive fishing grounds 

 has been going on for centuries without exhausting 

 the supply. 



A PERMANENT INDUSTRY. 



The Arctic Current, which washes the shores of 

 Labrador and Newfoundland, is laden with food on 

 which the cod lives and thrives, and brings with it a 

 never-failing supply for its sustenance. So far from 

 being unfavorable to the production of life, the Arctic 

 seas and the great rivers which they send forth are 

 swarming with minute forms of life, constituting in 

 many places "a living mass, a vast ocean of living 

 slime." Swarms of minute crustaceans, annelids, and 

 mollusca feed on this slime and in their turn become 

 food for the larger marine animals even up to the 

 giant whale ; and curiously enough, this ocean slime 

 is most abundant in the coldest waters, and especially 

 in the neighborhood of ice-fields and icebergs. Thus 

 the great current in the ocean, which rushes out of 

 Baffin Bay, carrying on its bosom myriads of icebergs 

 and washing the shores of Labrador and Newfound- 

 land, is swarming with these minute forms of marine 

 life from the minute crustacean and the crab and 

 prawn together, with the molluscous animals and star- 



