120 
DESTRUCTION OF FISH BY MAN. 
to follow the sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent 
enough, and a police energetic enough, to repress the ardent 
cupidity of their pursuers. 
The seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which 
feed almost exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and 
of course their destruction or numerical reduction must have 
favored the multiplication of the species of fish principally 
preyed upon by them. I have been assured by the keeper of 
several tamed seals that, if supplied at frequent intervals, each 
seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds of fish, or 
about a quarter of his own weight, in a day.* A very intel¬ 
ligent and observing hunter, who has passed a great part of his 
life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the 
fresh-water otter of the Northern American States, estimates 
their consumption of fish at about four pounds per day. 
Man has promoted the multiplication of fish by making 
war on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby 
compensated his own greater destructiveness.f The bird and 
beast of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as 
long as they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are 
limited by the demands of present appetite, and they do not 
wastefully destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the 
* See page 89, note, ante. 
t According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, 
three thousand herring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in the 
transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed 
in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000. 
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most suc¬ 
cessfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg 
alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a 
total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, 
from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the 
exportation of them altogether .—Das Leben des Meeres , p. 182. 
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or enough to 
supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe. 
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring 
too bony to be easily eaten, is used aS manure in very great quantities. 
Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has 
sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.— Dwight’s Travels , ii, pp. 512, 515. 
