long leadway of piling which extends out into the river and gathers in the fish. The current driving against the paddles of the wheel keeps it turning, and the fish swimming up-stream are caught in the scoopnets, lifted, flapping, out of the water, and dropped into a trough, where they slip back to the scow. All the fisher has to do is to keep his wheel in repair and sit still while it does the fishing. Sometimes it may turn for days without taking a fish; at other times the scoops will come up loaded, fairly overwhelming the lucky fisher. A story is told of one fisher who wakened from a nap to find his scow sinking with the weight of salmon caught. Hundreds of wheels may be found scattered along the Upper Columbia, and these, with the Indians, who still fish with spear and dip-net, take a large number of salmon every year. The Northwest furnishes an example, almost unique, of a rich, fertile, and wellpopulated land washed by a hardly less fertile sea. Here, within view of waters swarming with salmon, are cities important as manufacturing and commercial centers, green wheat valleys, orchards, hop-fields, and unmatched forests of merchantable timber. "No gift of sea or land," cries the orator, "has nature denied the smiling Northwest". -a bit of fustian not unsupported by the sober facts.

The proximity of the fisheries of Oregon and Washington to a populous coast, settled by a highly progressive and intelligent people, has tended to differentiate them in many ways from older fisheries. No one of the great industries shows in general less departure from the primitive methods of a hundred, or even a thousand, years ago than does fishing. Lines, baited hooks, and nets have been in use from time immemorial; the present-day methods are not far different from those of the time of Christ- toil of men in boats, peril, hardship, the will of the sea. Even the methods of curing by smoke, salt, or sunshine have changed little in hundreds of years. The cod of Newfoundland are cured now, for the most part, as they were in the beginning. But the Northwest, with its traps and the automatic machinery of its canneries, has devised new methods characteristic of its own spirit of enterprise. It has reduced, in some degree, a primitive industry to exact business standards. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, has fishing,

and especially the care of the products of the fisheries, reached such a state of development as here; nowhere has machinery been introduced to such an extent; nowhere has the world-old uncertainty of the industry, the element of "fisherman's luck," been so far eliminated.

The success of the Pacific fisher, however, is not wholly the result of his enterprise and resourcefulness. Nature has favored him with a variety of fish not only of superior quality as a food product, but having certain peculiar habits of life which render possible a highly organized system of fishing. The salmon, though not, as commonly supposed, a salmo at all, being no more closely related to the salmon of Europe and of our own Eastern waters than a dog is related to a fox, has the lifehabits, in common with the shad and other fish, of feeding and attaining its maturity in the sea and then ascending the rivers to lay its eggs, its young being born always in fresh water.

Each year, therefore, great runs, or schools, of fish swim upward from the sea into the rivers on their way to the spawning-beds. The fisher has only to set his nets or traps in the well-known courses taken by these runs near the river-mouths or in the rivers themselves, and he is sure of a catch. The only element of uncertainty, indeed, is in the size of the runs; the fish come up as regularly as the seasons, but there are years of great runs and years of small runs, so that the production varies, but not more so than the wheat or corn crop.

Few kinds of fish, indeed, have a more interesting life-history than the salmon. The several varieties-chinook, sockeye, king, chum, and so on-are distributed in enormous numbers along the Pacific coast from Alaska to California, ascending nearly all the streams and rivers, especially the Columbia in the United States and the Fraser in British America. When they first reach fresh water in the summer or fall, at the time of catching, they are in superb condition, the chinooks often weighing sixty pounds, and sometimes as high as eighty or ninety pounds, splendid great fish of fine proportion and coloring, and among the strongest of all the denizens of the sea in swimming and leaping. They take no food after entering fresh water, though they often swim for hundreds, even more

Indeed, fish-hatcheries are now established in the head-waters of many of the important salmon rivers, partly under the supervision of the various States and partly supported by the Federal government.

It is a work of deep interest and importance. At the various stations the native salmon are caught in large numbers, artificially spawned, and the eggs are hatched under conditions which prevent the very large losses of the natural spawning-beds and of the young fry after hatching. As soon as the young are capable of caring for themselves they are “planted" in the rivers and begin their journey to the sea. Millions of fry are thus distributed each year, thereby maintaining to a remarkable degree the fertility of the waters. The product of the different salmon-hatcheries tributary to the Columbia River alone, including two maintained by the United States government, four by Oregon, and six by Washington, amounted, in 1901, to over fifty-eight million fry. The authorities of Oregon and Washington are much alive. to the importance of this growing industry, and have appointed fish-wardens to execute the laws which control and restrict the taking of fish, the size of the nets, the distance between nets, and the definite seasons set for fishing, the objects of these laws being to permit enough fish to pass up the streams every year to maintain the spawning supply, and yet to allow as large a number as possible to be taken. Intelligently regulated, the Northwesterner believes that his fisheries may be made a steady source of profit through all future time.

The six chief salmon-catching centers on the Pacific coast, in the order of the quantity of fish packed (in 1901), are Alaska, Puget Sound (British Columbia), the Columbia River, the Oregon coast, the Washington coast, and the California rivers. About four fifths of the entire catch was in American waters, one fifth in Canadian. For their extent and importance, the annual product now being worth over twenty million dollars, employing an army of men and millions of capital, the Pacific salmon-fisheries are of surprisingly recent development. Like every industry in the Northwest, they have seemingly sprung into importance overnight-yesterday no

While it is true that there was fishing for packing purposes in the Columbia River as far back as 1866, the industry attained no prominence except in that river until 1876 and 1878, when the northern fisheries in Puget Sound (British Columbia) and Alaska were opened, at first modestly and experimentally. The great growth did not begin until 1886; but since that time the expansion in the business has been well-nigh incredible, the Puget Sound pack increasing by eleven hundred per cent., the Alaska pack by fifteen hundred per cent. The California pack of recent years has been small, bearing no important relation to the total output, while the Columbia River product, though still large, has not increased for years.

Varieties of salmon differing from those in the Columbia are taken in the northern fisheries; in Puget Sound chiefly the sockeye, a fish of good quality, but much smaller than the chinook, averaging only seven or eight pounds to the fish. In Alaska the principal fish is the king-salmon, the runs of both sockeye and king being much larger than the Columbia River runs, and the business generally on a larger scale. The fish of Puget Sound, for the most part, go up the Fraser River in British Columbia, being caught in Georgia Gulf before crossing the international boundary. Many of the Canadian fishers look upon this fishing as an encroachment on their rights, though it is all conducted in American waters, and there are enough fish passing the nets to furnish the Canadians of the Fraser River a large yearly pack. It is significant of the commercial friendship of the two countries, much more noticeable in the West than in the East, that the Canadian government has recently given permission to the State of Washington for the establishment, on the Canadian head-waters of the Fraser, of a fish-hatchery, the aim of which is to help maintain the supply of fish for Americans and Canadians alike.

Nothing, surely, would have astonished our forefathers more than the prophecy that fish caught in the Pacific Ocean would one day be served fresh and in prime condition six thousand miles away in London, and that within three weeks of the time they were alive in their native waters.

F

EW people appreciate the fact that to-day, at the dawn of the twentieth century, there are still parts of the old Roman Empire where no traveler of modern times has been; that there are ancient towns which no tourist has seen, temples and towers that no lover of classic architecture has delighted in, inscriptions in ancient Greek that no savant has as yet deciphered, whole regions, in fact, full of antiquities for which no Baedeker has been written, and which are not shown upon the latest maps. There are regions within our temperate zone where no modern European foot has trod, so far as we are able to tell-regions where the civilization of Greece and Rome once flourished, and where fine monuments of classic art, and of an unfamiliar art that supplanted the classic, waste their beauties upon the ignorant sight of half-civilized nomads.

To realize the truth of this, one needs only to cross the ranges of mountains that run parallel to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and, avoiding all caravan routes, journey independently about the barren country that lies between these mountains and the Euphrates. Here is a territory which, though not wholly unexplored, is full of most wonderful surprises. Here are cities and towns long deserted, not so great or so imposing, perhaps, as Palmyra, but far better preserved than the city of Zenobia, and giving a much truer picture of the life of the ancient inhabitants than one can draw from those famous ruins. These towns are not buried, like the great cities of the Mesopotamian plains, nor have their sites been built upon in modern times, as

those of the classic cities of Greece have been; they stand out against the sky upon high ridges, or lie sheltered in sequestered valleys, presenting to the view of the traveler, as he approaches them, very much the same aspect that they did in the fourth century of our era, when inhabited by prosperous, cultivated, and happy people, or when deserted by those inhabitants some thirteen hundred years ago.

I have said that the region is not wholly unexplored: it is a territory as large as England or the State of New York, traversed from north to south by a highway upon which the pilgrims from all the northern Islamic countries journey to Damascus and thence to Mecca. It is crossed in the north by a great caravan route extending from the sea to the Euphrates, and in the south by another important route leading from Damascus to Bagdad by way of Palmyra. At intervals between these extremes there are two other routes for caravans, which are infrequently used. Upon the more important roads, especially between Aleppo and Damascus, there are towns of considerable size. These are situated in the plain, and consist, in some cases, of houses poorly built of broken stones from ruined buildings of antiquity, but more generally of mud huts, called kubbe. But the hill country of northern central Syria, the country of deserted cities and towns, the region of which I am writing, is one of the districts that are still virtually unexplored. Portions of it, those nearest to known and settled country, have been visited from time to time by scholars in search of inscriptions, but each of these has usually followed the track of the first explorers.