When the last adult alewife of the season drops down Stony Brook for the tidal inlet and the sea, it has left the renewal of its continuity and motion behind it. The little alewives follow out the route of their elders with a silent animism, sent by ancient habit and unknown need. The repetitive ways of the anadromous fish come out of geologic time. On the long track since then, the adults, reaching their spawning grounds, have had the drive of the sperm toward the egg. From the top of a falls to the depth of the sea there are equivalent lifts and falls in their own being. The young, tiny and perishable though they may be, have the same inalienable motion in them. After hatching, young alewives form dense schools, and begin to feed on the plankton--tiny organisms and plant life--in the pond waters. Occasionally they can be seen flipping on the surface. They are subject to attack by all kinds of predators: perch, pickerel, frogs, herons, kingfishers, water snakes, and many others, from the time they are out of the egg. Landlocked waters are often stocked with spawning alewives for that very reason. The fry make an excellent diet for such popular game fish as bass, trout, and salmon. The survivors begin to move out of the ponds about the beginning of July. In other areas I have heard that the majority do not start down until September. The first time I saw them was on the second of July, when they were being drawn down by the thousands through the dam opening at the head of the fishway. They were scarcely over an inch long, and as they came in from the ponds they reflected the summer-green of the water. Their eyes seemed huge in proportion to the size of their bodies. They were poured down the boiling water of the ladder, tossed around like chips and slivers, spilled down helter-skelter; but where the current slowed, farther down the brook, they held together in the fashion of their race. There is an account, in a _Report of the Alewife Fisheries of Massachusetts_, 1921, of some alewives hatched out in the fisheries at Sandwich, Massachusetts, in June of 1919. The eggs were put in water of 72 degrees Fahrenheit and half of the lot, in that warm temperature, were hatched in only forty-eight hours. “In the surface water were thousands of tiny alewives with food sacs nearly transparent in appearance, and with tails resembling fine silk threads. The tiny creatures, about one-fifth of an inch in length, wiggled through the water with surprising activity. The eyes in both the egg and the hatched fish were but faintly visible. At the end of ninety-six hours their size had increased considerably, the outline of the yolk sac and the body was plainly marked, and the eyes showed prominently. By this time all the eggs had hatched. In cold water the period of development is retarded proportionately to the lowering of the temperature.”