PRODUCED BY MAN. 773 



A story relating to the natural history of these true ' fishes ' 

 will show, in the way of a parallelism, the facility with which mis- 

 taken views may obtain currency, ' si modo imaginationem feriant 

 aut intellectum vulgarium notionum nodis astringant,' quantitative 

 measurements, statistics, relative proportions of masses to other 

 things, and even literature itself, notwithstanding. In the Oxford 

 University Museum we have a large skeleton of a tunny [Scomber 

 tliynnus), brought from Madeira, before my time, by my friend 

 Dr. Acland. A foreign naturalist, whose name, under the cir- 

 cumstances, I think well to withhold, but whose reputation is 

 commensurate with his very extensive performance, going over the 

 Museum with me one day, remarked, after paying a not undeserved 

 compliment to the skeleton, ^That fish never came from the 

 Mediterranean.' I answered that, as a matter of fact, it had 

 belonged to an ocean-going individual ; but I also asked how it 

 was possible to differentiate a Madeiran from a Mediterranean 

 specimen. My friend answered, ' The Mediterranean is too closely 

 fished by man to allow of any tunny attaining such dimensions.' 

 I was silent, though very vivid recollections of long, however 

 pleasant, days of coasting on those shores, without meeting any 

 considerable number of vessels, or passing, as on the south coast of 

 Asia Minor, any considerable towns except in ruins, might have 

 conspired with my recollections of St. Paul being driven up and 

 down for fourteen nights in Adria, to make me question this ex- 

 planation. Some time after, I found that Cetti records tunnies 

 of no less than from looo to 1800 lbs. as being caught now-a-days 

 in the Sardinian fisheries ^ ! 



The results of investigation into the extent to which man's 

 interference may have told injuriously upon the propagation of fish 

 smaller in size, if not smaller in importance, such as the herring, 

 may possibly show us that here too we have exaggerated our own 

 powers for mischief. Not only is the sea a large field, but cyclical 

 oscillations in the ' Frequenz ' of its inhabitants are at least as 

 possible, irrespectively of our interference, as are the similar varia- 

 tions observable in air-breathing animals; and many an animal, 

 as for example the horse in South America, has become extinct 

 even in recent, not to speak of earlier geological times, owing 

 to quite other than human agencies. Man has no monopoly of 

 ^ See Lenz, 'Zoologie der alten Griechen und Romer,' 1855, p. 485. 



