an
walls, which not all the fishes in the world could climb.

In the Gibbon River the cataracts have proved to the trout an
impassible barrier; but, strangely enough, its despised associate, the
sluggish, chunky blob, the little soft-bodied, smooth, black
tadpole-like fellow, with twinkling eyes and a voracious appetite--a
fish who cannot 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 a 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 has 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.

[Illustration]

THE COLORS OF ANIMALS

(FROM CHAPTERS IN POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY.)

BY SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, BART., M.P., F.B.S., ETC.

[Illustration]

The color of animals is by no means a matter