230 MARITIME PISCICULTURE. 



neighbouring countries that not a single public con- 

 veyance conducts to its territory, although the road by 

 which it is traversed be the only one to the most curi- 

 ous, but perhaps least known, industrial colony any- 

 where existing that of Comacchio, the population of 

 which, at the time when the barbarians chased before 

 them civilised nations, came, like the founders of Venice, 

 to take refuge in the immense marsh where, for centu- 

 ries since, they have employed themselves in trans- 

 forming it into the veritable means of cultivating the 

 ocean, and where their ingenious industry attracts the 

 young fish hatched in the Adriatic, and where they 

 gather them, when grown, by proceedings as rational 

 as those of the agriculturist who sows the ground and 

 gathers the produce." Indeed, they themselves are so 

 struck by the similarity of their processes to those of 

 agriculture, that they have always termed the basins 

 among which they pursue their avocation fields, as if 

 they were true cultivators of the soil ; the annual ascent 

 of the fish being the sowing of these fields. "Less 

 favoured than their neighbours at Venice, and unable 

 from their inferior position to aspire, like her, to com- 

 mercial supremacy or the aggrandisement of conquests, 

 they directed their genius to the construction of an ad- 

 mirable system of embankments, made of the mud of 

 lakes, strengthened by fragments of shell-fish, inter- 

 sected by numerous sluices connecting together well- 

 managed canals, which, by affording access to the waters 

 of the Adriatic and of the rivers bordering two sides of 

 the lagoon, enable them to have the entire or partial com- 

 mand of the lagoon as thoroughly as if they had to do 

 with the simple apparatus of a laboratory. Here these 

 simple people have remained submitting to the mono- 

 tony of a rigid discipline, and losing their sleep when the 

 storm lashes the lagoon and raises the waves, satisfied 

 with moderate wages and a daily allowance offish." 



Like other fishermen, they are clannish, remarkably 

 chary of new alliances, and no less averse to strangers 



