io6 GLIMPSES OF NATURE. 



levels. So far, then, we may discern a purpose 

 beneath the apparent lavishness of numbers ; and I 

 confess that, but for some intellectual comfort of the 

 kind afforded by the thought of fertility favouring 

 progress and advance, I, for one, should be strongly 

 tempted to think that the times were decidedly " out 

 of joint " as regards Madre Natura and her lavish 

 display of fertilising power. 



Think for a moment of what this productiveness of 

 Nature means. How many young, think you, does 

 an oyster produce in its day and generation ? If one 

 says a million of eggs, the statement, I should hold, 

 falls rather short than otherwise of the reality. Did 

 these eggs each come to full fruition and develop into 

 oysters, what a cheapening of that savoury mollusc 

 would ensue ! But of the million eggs, how many 

 proceed to mature development ? Not one in a 

 thousand, probably. The delicate " spat " is devoured 

 by fishes, killed by muddy water, and otherwise deci- 

 mated by cold and other agencies. Only a miserable 

 remnant of the oyster's progeny arrives at the stage 

 of adult oysterhood. " The rest is silence," as Hamlet 

 put it, in so far as the hundreds of thousands of 

 oyster- progeny are concerned. 



It is the same in many other places and departments 

 of animal life. What do you say to the fertility of a 

 cod-fish, a salmon, or a herring ? A single cod-fish, it 

 is calculated, will produce from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 

 eggs ; yet these swarms of eggs are liable to the attack 

 of thousands of enemies (report, sad to relate, says 

 among these enemies the father cod-fishes themselves 

 must be enumerated), and only a miserable fraction of 

 cod-eggs, herring-eggs, or salmon-eggs, therefore, ever 

 reaches maturity. Were it not so, in a year or two 



