174 FISH AS FA THERS. 



These swarms or migrations are known to farmers as 

 eel-fairs ; but the word ought more properly to be written 

 eel-fares, as the eels then fare or travel up the streams 

 to their permanent quarters. A great many eels, 

 however, never migrate seaward at all, and never seem 

 to attain to years of sexual maturity. They merely bury 

 themselves under stones in winter, and live and die as 

 celibates in their inland retreats. So very terrestrial do 

 they become, indeed, that eels have been taken with rats 

 or field-mice undigested in their stomachs. 



The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish, 

 originally (like the salmon) of freshwater habits, but now 

 partially marine, which ascends its parent stream for 

 spawning during the summer season. Incredible quan- 

 tities are caught for caviare in the great Eussian rivers. 

 At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people 

 collect in spring for the fishery, and work by relays, day 

 and night continuously, as long as the sturgeons are going 

 up stream. On some of the tributaries, when fishing is 

 intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been 

 known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the 

 backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. 

 (I take this statement, not from the ' Arabian Nights,' 

 as the scoffer might imagine, but from that most respec- 

 table authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the 

 enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any 

 falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays 

 from two to three million eggs, each of which, as caviare 

 eaters well know, is quite big enough to be distinctly 

 seen with the naked eye in the finished product. The 

 best caviare is simply bottled exactly as found, with the 



