FISHERY PROBLEMS 177 



of the sand in which it lies. Placed in an aquarium with 

 a white bottom, soles become plain and light-coloured ; 

 placed on a slate bottom, they grow dark. Placed on 

 a bed of variegated gravel, they become marbled. The 

 fish of the Sargasso Sea have bizarre shapes which remind 

 one of the Sargasso weed. 1 



Such adaptations are the fruit of ages. The living 

 creature lives by its past rather than by the present ; it 

 retains intact in its inherited patrimony the experience 

 handed down by generations of ancestors, thanks to 

 which it has triumphed. The instincts and habits of 

 to-day are the instincts and habits which have been 

 slowly acquired by the species during the ages. The 

 children of experience and natural selection, they are 

 invincible. I need not again refer to the origin nor to 

 the regularity of the migration of the salmon at the 

 spawning season, 2 but I may take this opportunity of 

 offering fresh proofs of the constancy of some of the 

 more important species and their attachment to their 

 ancestral breeding-grounds. 



When, at the end of the ninth century, the Normans 

 and the Basques, driven out of the North Sea by the 

 Dutch, began to hunt the whale in the West Atlantic, 

 they discovered America nearly five centuries before 

 Christopher Columbus, and in the neighbourhood of 

 the " New Lands " (Newfoundland) they caught 

 enormous quantities of cod, as do the men of Fecamp 

 and St. Malo to-day. Every one knows that Yarmouth- 

 Lowestoft is the greatest herring port in the world. As 



1 The sargasso, sargasso weed, or sea-grape, is a ramifying alga 

 provided with spherical buoys. The currents tear them from the 

 coasts of Mexico and Florida and drive them into a calm belt 

 a little south of the Azores, where they accumulate and form the 

 Sargasso Sea. a See p. 26. 



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