Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/466

450 of herring arrested in his career. And the trawling, instead of injuring the herring, captured and removed hosts of their worst enemies. That is how "it stood to reason" when one got to the bottom of the matter.

I do not think that any one who looks carefully into the subject will arrive at any other conclusion than that reached by my colleagues and myself: namely, that the best thing for governments to do in relation to the herring-fisheries is, to let them alone, except in so far as the police of the sea is concerned. With this proviso, let people fish how they like, as they like, and when they like. At present, I must repeat the conviction we expressed so many years ago, that there is not a particle of evidence that anything man does has an appreciable influence on the stock of herrings. It will be time to meddle when any satisfactory evidence that mischief is being done is produced.—Nature.

 

APPINESS is the normal condition of every living creature, for in a state of nature every normal function is connected with a pleasurable sensation. "To enjoy is to obey"; if human life were what it could be and what its Author intended it to be, the path of duty would be a flowery path, the reward of virtue would not be a crown of thorns; man, like all his fellow-creatures, would attain to his highest well-being by simply following the promptings of his instincts. Wild animals have not lost their earthly paradise; he who has observed them in the freedom of their forest homes can not doubt that to them existence is a blessing, and death merely the later or earlier evening of a happy day. Nor would our missionaries find it easy to persuade an able-bodied savage that earth is a vale of tears, till fire-water and fire-arms demonstrate the superiority of revelation over the light of nature. The children of the wilderness need no holidays; to them life itself is a festival and earth a play-ground for manifold games, not the less entertaining for being sometimes spiced with danger or prompted by hunger and thirst.

But in process of time the daily life of a combatant in the harder and harder struggle for existence became so joyless and wearisome that the clamors of an unsatisfied instinct suggested the institution of periodical festivals: pleasure-days intended to offset the tedium of monotonous toil, as gymnastic exercises tend to counteract the 