THE SALMON-FISHERY 329 
Alaska a barrier of sand and gravel was once formed across 
the mouth of a river by a phenomenal storm. The river 
was, however, able to percolate through. When the salmon 
returned to their river, so determined were they to get up, 
they threw themselves out of the water on to the pebbly 
beach, and some at least succeeded in wriggling and jump- 
ing till they reached the other side. The natives profited 
by the experience, though the devotion of the salmon 
deserved a better fate. Only three things will apparently 
keep salmon from their own home, — pollution of the river, 
insuperable natural barriers, and man’s persecutions. All 
these three are one, and that one is Death. If the summer 
is early and the water warm, well and good; they return 
to their riverearly. If itis late, they are content to “bide.” 
If it becomes too cold after they arrive, they will return 
to the sea and go up again later. In these adventurous 
journeys the larger fish are the leaders. Obstacles are only 
things to be overcome. They will leap ten feet out of the 
water up a cataract. With successive leaps they will 
climb a fall of thirty feet. They will go on jumping till 
they are dashed to pieces and, bruised and dying, are 
borne down on the bosom of the river they loved, back to 
a tomb in the great deep out of which they came. The 
zeal of Kim and his old Lama in search of the river of the 
arrow was no greater than that of this kingly-spirited fish. 
The fact that he can no longer people our rivers is no fault 
of his." 
This very persistence of the salmon is his own undoing. 
? A most interesting fact noticed about salmon by Mr. W. G. Gosling 
is the existence in certain rivers below the falls of pot-holes scooped 
out by the water in the solid rock. While watching salmon leap up 
