THE DRAMA OF LIFE g 



threw themselves like a continuous cataract into the sea 

 in a throng so dense that they seemed to the eye to form 

 an almost solid mass. Thousands came, thousands went, 

 hundreds of thousands swam and dived, and yet other 

 hundreds of thousands awaited the footsteps which should 

 rouse them also. There was such a swarming, whirring, 

 rustling, fluttering, flying, and creeping aU about us that we 

 almost lost our senses. . . . The cloud of birds around us 

 at the summit was so thick that we only saw the sea dimly 

 and indefinitely as in twihght. . . . The millions of which 

 I had been told were really there.' 



Speakiug of the dense swarms of haddocks and the hke 

 which throng at the spawning time into the Norwegian 

 fjords, the same naturalist says : — 



' Animated, almost maddened, by one impulse, the fish 

 swim so thickly that the boat has hteraUy to force a way 

 among them, that the overweighted net baffles the com- 

 bined strength of the fishermen or breaks under its catch, 

 that an oar placed upright among the densely packed crowd 

 of swimmers remains for a few moments in its position be- 

 fore falling to one side.' 



Perhaps this final touch is exaggerated, but the general 

 impression has been verified many times in the lochs in the 

 West of Scotland. 



The prodigal abundance of larger forms of life imphes 

 the still greater abundance of small fry, for all are linked 

 by nutritive chains. It is in the open-water of lake and 

 sea that we get our best impressions of multitudinousness. 

 At the spring maximima of the Rotifer or Wheel- Animalcule 

 called Synchoeta, there may be about three millions to a 

 square yard of lake ; at the summer maximum of the slimy 



