I think
nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon
after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was
not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of
solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged
read their Bibles.
Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on
the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes,
since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only,
but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed.
The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe
and America are not so interesting to the student of nature, as
the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the
tops of mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle
in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water
in so many places, in greater or less numbers. The natural
historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good
luck merely, but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative
man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water,
so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new
genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science
is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
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