SEA-TROUT IN THE SHETLANDS 123 



champagne ; and gave, he did not know why, 

 three skips out of the water, a yard high, and 

 head over heels, just as the salmon do when 

 they first touch the noble, rich salt water, 

 which, as some wise men tell us, is the mother 

 of all living things." The President of the 

 American Natural History Museum, according 

 to a Press report of March 1918, put forward 

 the conundrum whether life " is solely physico- 

 chemical in its energies or whether it includes 

 a plus energy or element which may have 

 distinguished life from the beginning." I apolo- 

 gize for the polysyllables. Most fishermen would, 

 I know, prefer the language of the poet to that 

 of the scientist to describe the upward evolution 

 of life, in ten million centuries or so, from the 

 ingredients of sea water to man : 



A fire-mist and a planet, a crystal and a cell, 

 A jelly-fish and a Saurian, the cave where cave-men dwell ; 

 Then a sense of law and beauty, and a face turned from 

 the clod. 



Some call it "Evolution," 



And others call it "God." (W. H. Carrieth.) 



I should like to know the man who wrote 

 that. But to get back to the scientist: he 

 explained that existing sea water is an ideal 

 chemical medium for life, as its chemical compo- 



