h."

For we, too, longed for the South again.

FISH DRUGGING IN THE PACIFIC

In an American magazine of a few months ago mention was made of the
"discovery" of a method of capturing fish by impregnating the waters of
slowly running rivers or small lakes with a chemical which would produce
stupefaction, and cause the fish to rise helpless to the surface. The
American discoverer no doubt thought he really had "discovered," though
I am sure many thousands of people in the civilised world have heard
of, and some few hundreds very often seen, fish captured in a somewhat
similar manner, the which is, I believe, practised not only in India,
Africa and South America, but in the islands of the North and South
Pacific, and I have no doubt but that it was known thousands of years
ago--perhaps even "when the world was young."

Nearly all the Malayo-Polynesian people inhabiting the high, mountainous
islands of the South Pacific and North Pacific Oceans can, and do,
catch fish in the "novel" manner before mentioned, _i.e._, by producing
stupefaction, though no chemicals are used, while even the Australian
aborigines--almost as low a type of savage as the Fuegians--use a
still simpler method, which I will at once briefly describe as I saw it
practised by a mob of myall (wild) blacks camped on the Kirk River, a
tributary of the great Burdekin River in North Queensland.

At a spot where the stream was about a hundred feet wide, and the water
very shallow--not over six inches in depth--a rude but efficient dam was
expeditiously constructed by thrusting branches of she-oak and _ti_-tree
into the sandy bottom, and then making it partially waterproof by
quickly filling the interstices with earthen sods, _ti_-tree bark,
reeds, leaves, and the other _debris_ found on the banks. In the centre
a small opening was left, so as to relieve the pressure when the
water began to rise. Some few hundred yards further up were a chain of
water-holes, some of which were deep, and in all of which, as I knew
by experience, were plenty of fish--bream, perch, and a species of
grayling. As soon as the dam was complete, the whole mob, except some
"gins" and children, who were stationed to watch the opening before
mentioned, sprang into the water, carrying with them great quantities of
a greasy greyish blue kind of clay, which rapidly dissolved and charged
the clear water with its impurities. Then, too, at the same time thirty
or forty of their numbe