AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 329 



During the winter solstice between the lapse of the autumnal 

 and the verging of the vernal equinoxes in order to get this enor- 

 mous food-supply, the fur-seals are necessarily obliged to disperse 

 over a very large area of fishing-ground, ranging throughout the 

 North Pacific, five thousand miles across between Japan and the 

 Straits of Fuca. In feeding, they are brought to the southward all 

 this time ; and, as they go, they come more and more in contact 

 with those natural enemies peculiar to the sea of these southern 



of the whole consumption. If the seals can get double the quantity which I 

 credit them with above, startling as it seems, still I firmly believe that they eat 

 it every year. An adequate realization by icthyologists and fishermen as to 

 what havoc the fur-seal hosts are annually making among the cod, herring, 

 and salmon of the northwest coast and Alaska, would disconcert and astonish 

 them. Happily for the peace of political economists who may turn their at- 

 tention to the settlement and growth of the Pacific coast of America, it bids 

 fair to never be known with anything like precision. The fishing of man. 

 both aboriginal and civilized, in the past, present, and prospective, has never 

 been, is not, nor will it be, more than a drop in the bucket contrasted with those 

 piscatorial labors of these icthyophagi in the waters adjacent to their birth. 

 What catholic knowledge of fish and fishing-banks any one of those old 

 " seecatchie " must possess, which we observe hauled out on the Pribylov 

 rookeries each summer ! It has, undoubtedly, during the eighteen or twenty 

 years of its life, explored every fish-eddy, bank, or shoal throughout the 

 whole of that vast immensity of the North Pacific and Bering Sea. It has had 

 more piscine sport in a single twelvemonth than Izaak Walton had in his 

 whole life. 



An old sea-captain, Dampier, cruising around the world just about two 

 hundred years ago, wrote diligently thereof (or, rather, one Funnel is said to 

 have written for him), and wrote well He had frequent reference to meeting 

 hair-seals and sea-lions, fur-seals, etc. , and fell into repeating this maxim, evi- 

 dently of his own making : " For wherever there be plenty of fysh, there be 

 seals." I am sure that, unless a vast abundance of good fishing-ground was 

 near by, no such congregation of seal-life as is that under discussion on the 

 Seal Islands could exist. The whole eastern half of Bering Sea, in its en- 

 tirety, is a single fish-spawning bank, nowhere deeper than fifty to seventy-five 

 fathoms, averaging, perhaps, forty ; also, there are great reaches of fishing- 

 shoals up and down the northwest coast, from and above the Straits of Fuca, 

 bordering the entire southern, or Pacific coast, of the Aleutian Islands. The 

 aggregate of cod, herring, and salmon which the seals find upon these vast 

 icthyological areas of reproduction, must be simply enormous, and fully equal 

 to a most extravagant demand of the voracious appetites of CaUorhini. 



When, however, the fish retire from spawning here, there, and everywhere 

 over these shallows of Alaska and the northwest coast, along by the end of 

 September to the 1st of November, every year, I believe that the young fur- 



