Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/447

 the population as follows among the great families into which ethnologists have separated the peoples: Negroes, 130,000,000; Hamites, 20,000,000; Bantus, 13,000,000; Foolahs, 8,000,000; Nubians, 1,500,000; Hottentots, 50,000. This would give a total population of 172,550,000. These figures are, of course, only approximate, and both German and English geographers think them too low, the former estimating the population at 200,000,000.

About Herrings.—From statistics of the Scottish herring-fisheries, furnished by a writer in "Chambers's Journal," we may get a partial idea of the enormous productiveness and abundance of that species of fish. During a recent year the herrings taken in Scottish waters and cured were sufficient to fill one million barrels, each barrel containing an average of seven hundred fish. This quantity it must be observed represents cured fish only, and only those which are caught in Scotland under the superintendence of the Fishery Board. It is pretty certain that as many herrings are captured and offered for sale as fresh fish and "reds" as are cured for the markets in Scotland and offered for sale as salt herrings; which gives us the prodigious total of fourteen hundred millions withdrawn annually from the sea; and even this number, vast as it is, does not include what are used in the form of white-bait, or those which are sold as sprats.

After draining the sea to such an extent, it might almost be supposed that there would be scarcely herrings enough left to suffice for a breeding-stock; but the demands of man are a mere fraction of what are taken out of the shoals. All that are captured, as well as all that are wasted during the capture, and destroyed in the process of curing, sink into insignificance when compared with the vastness of the quantities which are devoured by other enemies of the fish. Cod and ling are known to prey extensively on the herring; and a calculation, based on the number of cod and ling annually caught under the auspices of the Scottish Board of Fisheries (three million five hundred thousand were taken in 1876), assumes that there is a capital stock of these fish in the Scottish firths and seas of seventy million individuals; and that each individual consumes four hundred and twenty herrings per annum, which at the rate of two herrings every day for seven months in the year, shows a consumption of twenty-nine thousand four hundred million individual herrings. Nor does the account stop at this point. The commissioners who recently collected information on the Scottish herring-fisheries, assume that in Scotland alone the gannet (a sea-bird) will annually draw on the shoals to the extent of one thousand one hundred and ten million herrings! In addition to dog-fish, cod, gannets, and other sea-birds, the herring has many other enemies; porpoises, seals, coal-fish, and other predaceous fishes are constantly lying in wait to fall upon and devour them. A female herring, we know, yields over thirty thousand eggs; but at the shoaling-time myriads of those eggs are devoured by a variety of enemies; besides which, hundreds of thousands of the eggs are never touched by the fructifying milt of the male fish, and so perish in the waters.

A Fabled Eastern City.—In a communication to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay, M. C. Doughty gives an account of a visit to the so-called rock city of El-Hejjer, which lies upon the Haj road in Arabia, at twenty camel-journeys' distance from Damascus, and about which many extravagant stories are current among the Arabs. In the days of Ptolemy, who calls it Egra, the place was an emporium on the trade-road of gold and frankincense to Syria. Having got there after great fatigue, Mr. Doughty found the fabled seven cities of the Arabs—said to be hewed in as many mountains—to be about a hundred funereal chambers excavated in the sandstone rocks. The city appears, by the traces remaining of foundations, to have been a cluster of four or five palm villages in clay, each surrounded by a wall in the ordinary Arab fashion. In their interiors the funereal monuments are plain sepulchral chambers with sunken tombs in the floor and recesses, while in the walls are shallow shelves of a man's length. Inscriptions are seen handsomely engraved in a panel above the doorways in many of the monuments. Above these again, in the nobler monuments, there is very commonly