Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/476

 458 In the Gibbon River the cataracts have proved to the trout an impassable barrier; but, strangely enough, its despised associate, the sluggish, chunky blob, a little soft-bodied, smooth, black, tad-pole-like fellow, with twinkling eyes and a voracious appetite—a fish who can not leap at all—has crossed this barrier. Hundreds of blob live under the stones in the upper reaches of the stream, the only fish in the Gibbon waters. There he is, and it is a standing puzzle even to himself to know how he got there. We might imagine, perhaps, that some far-off ancestor, some ancient Queen of the Blobs, was seized by an osprey and carried away in the air. Perhaps an eagle was watching and forced the osprey to give up its prey. Perhaps in the struggle the blob escaped, falling into the river above the falls, to form the beginning of the future colony. At any rate, there is the great impassable waterfall, the blob above it and below. The osprey has its nest on a broken pine tree above the cataract, and its tyrant master, the bald eagle, watches it from some still higher crag whenever it goes fishing.

Two years ago the Hon. Marshall McDonald, whose duty as United States Fish Commissioner it is to look after the fishes wherever they may be, sent me to this country to see what could be done for his wards. It was a proud day when I set out from Mammoth Hot Springs astride a black cayuse, or Indian pony, which answered to the name of Jump, followed by a long train of sixteen other cayuses of every variety of color and character, the most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, as in the old Norse legends, she had inherited his strength, his wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I came back from this strange land and told the story of its fishes, other men were sent out from Washington with nets and buckets. They gathered up the trout and carried them to the rivers above the falls, and now all the brooks and pools of the old lava-bed, the fairest streams in the world, are full of their natural inhabitants.

some peculiarities in the distribution of plants in Great Britain—that it has a southern flora opposite France, a Germanic flora on the east coast, a Lusitanian flora in the southwest, and on the extreme west two American plants unknown elsewhere in Europe—Mr. Clement Reid expresses the belief that in the Britain of the present day we may study the repeopling of a country over which everything has been exterminated, and, until we have fuller direct evidence of the stages of the process, we may safely accept Greenland and Britain as illustrating the way in which Nature works to fill gaps in the fauna and flora, whether these are caused by changes of climate, by volcanic agency, or by the submergence and reappearance of islands.