.— 
“ag 
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. 
267 
reads like a California exaggeration, but is from thoroughly accredited and at- 
tested sources of information. This is what the state commissioner writes under 
date of 12th November, 1890 :— 
“Tf I were to say that our shad, which were planted here some ten or more 
_ years ago, are the commonest fish in the market, as well as the cheapest, it would 
be doubted, and if I said that the shad during the spawning season come into our 
trout streams, many miles from salt waters, in such numbers that barrels of them 
might be taken with the aid of a pitchfork, (that would be called a California 
_ story), nevertheless it would be a true one. No one away from here can appre- 
ciate the extent to which the carp, shad, and catfish have increased in our waters. 
I can well remember, and not so very long ago, when I paid $1.50 for a pound of 
shad. ‘To-day you can get an eight-pound shad for 50 cents.” 
But this is not the only point of interest about the shad of the Pacific. Be- 
fore the experiments were made there, it was a dictum that fish planted in a river 
would return to it when mature for the purpose of spawning. But the California 
experiments have demonstrated that this instinct of nativity, should it really 
exist, is, in this case, dominated by other influences, which have dispersed the 
shad planted in the Sacramento widely beyond the limits which had been 
assigned to them and in a most unexpected direction. , 
The reason for this is probably to be found in the general influences of the 
Japan current, which brings the warmth of equatorial Asia to temper the ex- 
tremes of Arctic climate on the southern shores of the Alaskan peninsula, and 
thence sweeping to the south, carries tropical heats to the latitude of San Fran- 
cise). Repelled om one hand by the low temperature of the great rivers and 
fringe of coast waters, and solicited on the other by the equable and higher 
temperature of the Japan current, the shad have become true nomads, and have 
broken the bounds of the hydrographic area to which we had supposed they 
would be restricted. Following the track of the Asiatic current, and finding 
more congenial temperature as they progress, it is not unreasonable to expect that 
some colonies will eventually reach the coast of Asia,and establish themselves in 
its great rivers. 
