— And of a Herring It is a newer discovery that
fish which spend all their life in the sea carry scales not much less legible than the salmon. The writing on their scales is made not by salt water and fresh, but by summer and winter. Like the sun-dial the herrings " only count sunny hours "; they grow in the summer
months and cease growing in the winter. A good Norwegian scale-reader can tell you from a scale not only how many summers and winters the fish has seen but also how much growth it made in the period. Other details are indicated (again there is a parallel with the tree) such as the influence of the weather of particular summers on the rate of growth. Natural history owes a great debt to Scandinavian sailors as well as men
of science. One or them probed, after .all the world had been foiled, what may be called the greatest mystery in the solo- monic ways of animals, the migration of the young eels (which at that period bear no likeness to eels) from the abysms of the Atlantic to the streams and ponds of Britain and of America. In the new reading of scales there may sometimes be something of conjecture, but it supplies absolute evidence as to longevity. It seems strange that so great a fish as the salmon with the free range of two worlds and the capacity to do without food for long periods should be short lived while the voracious pike
in a pond is a rival of the parrot or tortoise.
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