Herrings, for example. What would the poorer throngs of our large cities do, without that useful little cheap dish?
The amount of herrings caught yearly around British shores almost exceeds belief. They appear often in mighty shoals, swimming closely packed throughout a mile or more, being devoured as they swim, to the tune of millions, and being captured by fishermen in masses.
Yet year by year the supply goes on, apparently undiminished.
One fisherman alone, at work near the French coast, reckoned that in the course of a single night he had taken over five hundred thousand herrings, half which he threw back into the sea. An unusual amount, of course. But what must be the sum-total captured in a year by the combined efforts of all fishermen?
In a year, however, a herring produces somewhere about thirty thousand eggs. What, then, must be the sum-total of eggs produced by all herrings in the ocean?
True, vast numbers of the eggs come to nothing; vast numbers serve as food for other creatures. Yet enormous supplies escape countless dangers, and succeed. Thus the poor man’s food is bountifully given, in an ever-recurring harvest.
Among “Food-fishes” the “White” kinds are prominent, belonging mainly to two large families. One of these families includes Cod, Whiting, and Haddock. The other consists of Flat Fishes, such as Turbot, Halibut, Sole, Dab, Plaice.
At the head of the first family stands the Cod, that most useful and abundant creature, found throughout the deeper waters of northern seas.
During particular seasons the multitudes of cod are accompanied by multitudes of cuttlefishes—rather singularly, since cuttlefish are the favourite food of cod. But perhaps it would be more correct to say that the cuttlefish are accompanied by the cod—the latter doubtless going where they can find the food that they like. At these seasons millions of cuttlefish are caught, to be used as bait, by means of which enormous supplies of cod are taken for the market.
A calculation has been made that, in the course of a single spring, on the banks not far from Newfoundland, something like one hundred and twenty millions of cod are the result of combined British and American and French exertions.