Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/55

Rh statistical tables of the Minister of the Marine reaches the prodigious figure of 1,407,390,400. In the same year there were returned 1,262,600 bushels of mussels and 620,000 bushels of other shellfish than oysters and mussels. The same authority estimates that 2,200,000 lobsters, 16,000,000,000 shrimps and prawns, 1,080,000,000 sardines, and 400,000,000 herrings are consumed in France in a single year. The cod, the mackerel, and the fresh fishes would also represent considerable quantities. The fishermen of the single port of Boulogne took 63,000,000 kilogrammes of fish during a period of nine years. Assuredly the statistics of such other countries as Great Britain, Norway, and Newfoundland would give not less considerable figures. These numbers illustrate the richness of the life that is concealed under the waves of existing seas.

Although the reptiles are much less various in our epoch than during the Secondary age, they are still numerous in some regions. According to Alcide d'Orbigny, caymans are numbered by thousands in the province of Moxos. The traveler Leguat, speaking of the extinct tortoises of the island of Rodriguez in 1708, wrote that they were seen sometimes in troops of two or three thousand, so that one could go more than two hundred paces on their backs without putting his foot on the ground. M. A. Milne-Edwards found reports in the office of the ministry according to which thirty thousand tortoises were taken from Rodriguez in a year and a half to supply Mauritius and Réunion. Venomous serpents are so common in India that M. Sauvage says that in comparison with them tigers and panthers are inoffensive beasts. According to official documents, more than nineteen thousand persons perished in India in one year from snake bites.

Warm-blooded animals have especially multiplied in our epoch. Livingstone met in the country of the Makololos more than thirty different species of birds; among them hundreds of ibis, files of three hundred pelicans, myriads of ducks, many geese, herons, kalas, crossbills, burgills, spoonbills, and flamingoes, and an enormous multitude of gulls and cranes. Delegorgue has also executed paintings showing the abundance of the birds. He speaks of having seen five hundred or a thousand vultures upon a single elephant's carcass. Nothing, he says, is more strange to the hunter than to see rising at his approach, circling in the air, that mass of feathered creatures which forms a kind of immense movable dais above him. Alcide d'Orbigny, in his travels in Bolivia, descending the Mamoré, found its banks animated with innumerable shore birds. The tantalus, in troops of several thousands, marched with slow steps upon the muddy parts in company with the red spoonbill or white egret, while the sand banks were covered with scissorbills and sea swallows, together with many goat-suckers. In the country of the Chiquitos, D'Orbigny met cardinal