HABITS OF YOUNG CALIFOBNIA SALMON. 481 



the Columbia River, and weighed eighty-three pounds. The writer has seen one on the Columbia 

 that weighed sixty-seven pounds. 



The California Salmon is easily caught with hook and line in the fresh-water tributaries, 

 where it goes to deposit its eggs. It does not readily take a fly, but becomes an easy victim wlirn 

 tempted with salmon roe, which is the most effective of all baits for catching thin iNh. When 

 prime it very much resembles in appearance the well-known Atlantic Salmon (Salmo nalar) in the 

 same condition, with this exception, that it has on its back and sides nearly black, star-like spots, 

 while the Atlantic Salmon has none, when fresh from the ocean. 



The California Salmon is a remarkable fish, and has had an extraordinary career. Fifty 

 years ago it was hardly known, except to students of natural history. Now it is known and eaten 

 almost all over the world, for there is hardly a port in the worid where ships have not carried the 

 canned Salmon of the Columbia, which is the same flsh under a different name; and not only has 

 this tisli, in the form of food, traveled nearly all over the world, but the living embryos of the 

 California Salmon have been transported to England, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, 

 Russia, Australia, and New Zealand, so that there is probably no one fish inhabiting a limited 

 locality which is known over the world in so many different places as the California Salmon. 



This magnificent fish is deserving of its career. If splendid proportions, of unsurpassed vigor 

 and spirit, it has no equal in external attractiveness among the race of fishes, except its own cousins 

 of the Atlantic and other oceans, while as regards the quality of its flesh and its marvelous abun- 

 dance in its habitat, it has but few equals in the world. As to the quality of its flesh, it closely 

 resembles the highly-prized Salmon, Salmo salar, of Great Britain and the Atlantic coast of 

 North America, which has no superior, and as to its abundance I need only say that nearly two 

 hundred million pounds have been caught in the Columbia River alone during the last six years, 

 without producing, according to the most recent testimony of the Columbia fishermen, any serious 

 diminution of the river's stock. 



DEVELOPMENT. The Salmon begins life as a bird does, in an egg. When the egg first leaves 

 the parent fish it is about one-fourth of an inch in diameter and of an orange tint. In a few days 

 there can be seen in the egg a fine dark line, which is the first visible beginning of the future 

 salmon. In nineteen days, in water at 55 Fahrenheit, the black pigment of the eye logins to show 

 through the translucent shell. In thirty-five days in the same water the young Salmon is hatched. 

 When it first emerges from the shell it is about an inch long, and carries under its body in a little 

 round sac the yolk of the egg it came from, on which it lives by absorption for about a month 

 longer, till its mouth is sufficiently completed to take food and its other organs to dispose of the 

 food it takes. When it first hatches it is a clumsy-looking and an awkwardly-moving object, 

 being about as graceful and efficient in its attempts to swim like a flsh as a human beginner's 

 attempts are to ride a bicycle. After it has lived in its sac a week or two it develops a disposition 

 to dive and hide under something, which it does with a pertinacity which is both characteristic of 

 the full-grown Salmon and prophetic of the tenacity of purpose it will show in ascending its 

 breeding rivers to spawn. This irresistible instinct to dive and hide takes it still deeper under 

 the gravel and rocks in the bed of the river which formed its birth-place, and it stays here in the 

 crevices of the rocks and gravel, as snug as possible, until the sac of food which nature 

 started it in life with is gone, and it is obliged to work for a living or starve. It would not be safe 

 for the little helpless creature now to venture out of the rocks and gravel where it was born, for it 

 would undoubtedly pay for its rashness by becoming food, while yet alone, for the larger fishes 

 above. So like the early Christians in the catacombs, it spends a large portion, if not all, of its 

 earlier life in or close by the under-world where it was born. As it gets larger it ventures out and 

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