NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 149 



passed through the Highlands on the 14th, he says there were " Great store of salmons 

 in the river." 



It is not impossible but that this might have been the case. The Mohawk river form- 

 erly contained trout, a species of the genus salmo, but it now has none. Fishes sometimes 

 leave their former haunts and repair to other places where they can find food more 

 agreeable or abundant, and where they deposite their spawn with greater safety. It is now 

 well known, that no salmon are ever seen in the Hudson, except a few eslrays who have 

 missed their way into the Connecticut river. Salmon delight in clear, cool, and limpid 

 water, and the Hudson is, particularly at the period of their vernal migration, discoloured 

 and muddy. Since the wood creek which falls into the western lakes has been connect- 

 ed with the Mohawk river, by a canal, the latter has been supplied with a species of dace 

 which has greatly increased ; and black basse and a salmon have been taken who penetrated 

 through the canal to the river : It would be a curious circumstance if the Hudson should 

 receive the salmon through this new channel, and a singular voyage for this fish to enter, 

 from the ocean, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to swim up the river of that name to Lake 

 Ontario, pass up the Onondaga river by Oswego, to the Oneida Lake, ascend Wood Creek 

 to the waters of the Mohawk river, and enter them by the canal, vault down the great 

 falls of the Cohoes, descend the Hudson, and return at the next vernal migration to the 

 St. Lawrence. Independently of the nature of the waters, and the food they furnish, 

 there must be some latent cause for the preference which is given by fishes to certain 

 rivers : Perhaps this may be, in some measure, ascribed to their periodical return to the 

 place of their origin. How shall we account for the salmon being in Connecticut river, 

 and in Merrimack and the rivers lying between, being perfectly destitute of these fish ? 

 Dr. Franklin told Kalm, that in that part of New England where his father lived, two rivers 

 fell into the sea, in one of which they caught great numbers of herrings, and in the other, 

 not one ; yet the places where the rivers discharged themselves into the sea, were not 

 far asunder. They had observed, that when the herrings came in spring to deposite their 

 spawn, they always swam up the river, where they used to catch them, but never came 

 into the other. The Doctor's father, who was settled between the two rivers, took some 

 in his nets as they were coming up for spawning, took out the spawn, and carefully 

 carried it across the land into the other river. It was hatched, and the consequence was, 

 that every year afterwards they caught more herrings in that river, and this is still the 

 case. This leads one to believe that the fish always spawn in the same place where they 

 were hatched, and from whence they first put out to sea. 



I at one time entertained hopes that the Journal of Hudson would have furnished sa- 

 tisfactory evidence on this subject, from the mode of fishing. It appears, that one time 



