Stony Brook was black with them. There was no open patch of stream bed to be seen. And with the excessive crowding, the general procession, so steadily insistent on its own time, was hurried up to some extent. Their motion became almost ponderous and tense, while individual fish leaped like dolphins, pewter- and gold-sided, over and through the dark herd. Others circled in and out or kept pace with the rest, staring ahead. They had a synchronized momentum of their own. If I dropped a stone in the middle of them, they would separate at that point and then close in to fill the gap. There could be no nullifying or breaking their united persistence. Their onwardness, their desperate dashing against the rocks, had its own logic--a logic which had nothing to do with hope, reason, or choosing another alternative. No way out, in other words. Slavery to the reproductive urge. These alewives are more dumb than sheep. If you were to press your own sympathy hard enough, you might feel a terrible lack of variety in them, or, paradoxically enough, of daring. The lidless-eyed and plunging multitude seems brutally driven, without a chance. This is “togetherness” with a terrible vengeance. Perhaps there is something here that we know too, as fellow animals, and lose sight of. At the risk of making one of those vaguely anthropomorphic assumptions against which the objective scientists are constantly warning us, I would guess that the self-motivation in this onward mass of fish might be compared to those human crowds that take action under stress, independently of the individuals that make them up. Suddenly a crowd, hitherto a random combination of people, takes on a frightening rhythm and purpose of its own. It is governed by laws which go back infinitely farther in the history of life than the immediate goal of its anger or exultation. I have explained nothing. I can only say that when I first saw these fish I was moved in spite of myself. Instinct is no more blind than wonder. To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race’s ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat the infinitely various will of life at its own game. All I could wish for would be to join it.