Happily, this fish also is very prolific. An individual often produces three or four millions of eggs in a season; and as many as eight millions have been found on one fish. Here, again, immense numbers of the eggs fail to develop, immense numbers are devoured. Yet multitudes come to perfection, and the ocean is still furnished with cod.
There is, however, a very serious danger, beginning to be recognised, in the case of cod and yet more of some other “white-fish” kinds; and this is that in time the reckless havoc worked may outrun even these wonderful sources of renewal. Fishing has been carried on in the past, without thought for the future. Little or no attention has been paid to sparing the young; and the valuable roe itself has been used as an article of food. Man may by-and-by have to pay dearly for his lack of foresight and common-sense.
As an illustration of the numbers of fishes in the sea, a curious tale is told about a deep-water kind of Mullet, known as the Tile-fish.
This particular species had not been discovered before the year 1879. A few specimens were then taken from over a bank about eighty miles from the coast of Massachusetts—large and brightly coloured. Near that bank, where they had made their home, they could at any time be easily caught.
But in the spring of 1882 a heavy gale took place; after which these fishes were seen in enormous quantities, floating at the surface of the water, covering a space of three hundred miles in length and fifty in breadth. One who saw the singular sight reckoned that something like fourteen hundred millions of them must have been there—enough to have supplied every man and woman and child in the United States with between two and three hundred pounds’ weight of fish.
In the following autumn, when fishermen went again to the bank for tile-fish, they found none. Not a single specimen turned up. The storm, probably by shifting the direction of the Gulf-stream and its “cold wall,” had either destroyed them all, or had slain so many as to frighten the survivors to a distance. In that particular district they had not, when the story was written, been seen again.
CHAPTER XXIII.
SOME ODDITIES OF FISH-LIFE
“3 Fish. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
1 Fish. Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.”
Pericles.
OF fishes which are remarkable for beauty names might be mentioned by the hundred; alike of food-fishes, of powerful and fierce-tempered kinds, and of those which may be described as purely ornamental. Not all are graceful in shape; but vast numbers are exquisite in colouring, especially when first drawn from the water. As they gasp out their lives, the brilliant tinting fades.