31 
be sustained by some supply of nutriment—this must 
be admitted, but this supply does not come from out- 
side the fish in the form of food. It comes from within 
the fish. It is the blood, the fat, the superfluous flesh 
that the salmon brings from the ocean in his own body 
that he lives on in fresh water, and that enables him to 
sustain life so long without taking food from outside 
into his stomach, and this explains—indeed it must ex- 
plain—why salmon do not have to feed in fresh water, 
It was remaked near the beginning of this paper that 
“the alimentary organs of the salmon are so modified 
at the spawning season that they could not eat if they 
would.” This is easily verified. If any one will ex- 
amine the viscera of a Chinook salmon, caught well 
above tide and near the spawning season, he will find 
that the stomach and throat of the fish are singularly 
contracted, so much so indeed that one cannot push 
one’s finger down the throat without lacerating the 
tissues, while the stomach is so shrunken that it will not 
hold a walnut. If it is very near the spawning season 
he will find the stomach still more contracted and always 
absolutely empty, with the exception of about half a 
teaspoonful of a yellowish, bilious-looking fluid. 
Having noticed the good natured controversy going 
on in the sporting papers about salmon not eating in 
fresh water, I began last fall to examine some of those 
that were caught at this station (Baird, Cal.), with 
especial reference to this question, intending at first to 
try 100 fish. We did, however, examine the stomachs 
of only 66 and then we stopped, because they were all 
exactly alike, and I was convinced that if we had tried 
100 or 100,000 they would all have been the same. In 
every one.of them the throats were very much contract- 
ed, the stomachs very much shrunken, and all entirely 
empty with the exception of the yellowish looking fluid 
just mentioned. As to the throat and stomach, every 
fish was an exact counterpart of all the rest. 
Here we have another admirable natural adaptation 
