Excerpt from Fresh Water Fishes and Their Ecology When we watch a summer thunder storm, which covers the earth with a sudden flood and makes rivulets by the road-side, each carrying down to the smaller streams its load of leaves and other organic debris, together with the lighter parts of the soil, and when we see these silt laden streams unite in rivers turbid with the rich spoil of the land, we are inclined to lament the enormous and oft-repeated waste, seeing no way in which it can be recovered in any considerable measure to the use of man; but if we follow it to the lake bottom and the river bed we shall see much of it arrested there, to become an aquatic soil, partly muddy water and partly wet mud, more fertile even than the richest fields, and sustaining a new population of plants and animals, of many grades and classes, one climbing upward, as we may say, upon the shoulders of another, to reach a level which makes them accessible again to our use. Since the waters which wash the surface of the earth fall virtually lifeless and sterile from the sky, whatever population they eventually contain must evidently be supplied from the contributions made to them by the earth, including, of course, the organic and inorganic substances dissolved out of the earth by surface wash and underground filtration. The aquatic population of a lake or stream is thus sustained by the wastes of the land - materials which would otherwise be carried down prae tically unaltered to the sea; and our rivers and lakes may be looked upon as a huge apparatus for the arrest, appropriation, digestion, and assimila tion of certain raw materials about to pass from our control, valueless and sometimes deleterious as they leave us, but capable of being worked over, renovated, and returned to us in new and valuable forms, mainly as fishes available for food. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.