and beluga oil, berries and roots which he is constantly consuming, at the same time, in the greatest freedom, and which are always in abundant supply. The full thought of my presentation will be better understood when it is remembered that a pound of fresh salmon has more nourishing and sustaining quality than the same amount dried. The salt-dried codfish with which we are so familiar is very different in its texture, and weighs many times more than it would if it were cured by the air and smoke-exposure to which the natives of Alaska are driven in preserving their fish. An exceedingly happy illustration of the singular force of habit which the salmon have in returning every recurring season to the exact localities of their birth was afforded near the Creole settlement of Neelshik on the Kenai Inlet coast. A small stream runs down to the gulf from the mountains and moors of the interior. Its mouth had been closed by a barrier of surf-raised sand and gravel during storms in the winter of 1879-80, and through which the sluggish stream filtered in its course without overflowing. When the salmon, which had descended the year previously from the upper waters of the stream in the course of their reproductive circuit, again returned to renew such labors in the following season, this unexpected wall barred their ingress. They did not turn away, but actually leaped out upon this sandy spit, and many of them succeeded, by spasmodic springs and wriggling, while on the dry gravel, in getting across and into the river-water beyond! the Creoles, in the meantime, having nothing to do except to walk down from their houses and gather up the self-stranded salmon as they fancied their size and condition. Inasmuch as these “old colonial settlers” are very pious, as well as very indolent, they were profuse in giving thanks to their patron saints for this unexpected bounty. The color of gold everywhere found by washing the sands of Cook’s Inlet on the Kenai shore early aroused the cupidity of the Russians. They made systematic examinations here under the lead of experienced men, between 1848 and 1855, and the Russian American Company spent a great deal of money in the same time by sustaining a large force of forty miners, directed by Lieutenant Doroshin, in active operations at the head of the inlet on the Kaknoo River, and in the Kenai Mountains and Prince William or Choogatch Alps. Gold was found, but in such small quantities, compared with the labor of getting it, that the ardor of the Russians soon cooled, and nothing as yet has resulted from the prospecting of our own miners in this district, who have been all over these Slavonian trails since the transfer. FOOTNOTES: [41] _Ursus richardsonii._ [42] One shot at Kenai Mission in 1880 measured nine feet two inches in length.