in considerable demand for various purposes, and as much as nine gallons has been at times extracted from one hogshead of fish. The prices obtained for the pilchard and the common herring are very similar-varying, of course, as the fish are plentiful or scarce.

THE SPRAT-HARVEST.

The sprat is another well-known and very popular member of the herring family; it is caught in large quantities in the upper reaches of the Firth of Forth, and off the coasts of Kent and Essex during November and December, and the sums derived from the proceeds of the fishery add largely to the grand total of the wealth which this country derives from the sea. The sprat is taken in various ways, on the whole much as the common herring and pilchards are taken, and also by means of very fine bag-nets. Large quantities of the sprats taken in the British seas are cured as sardines, and it is within the mark to say that the annual value of the sprat-fishery is a million sterling. In Scotland, sprats are called 'garvies,' from the place in the Firth of Forth where great numbers of them are taken. In France, again, the sprat is called a sardine; the real sardine is rare. A great sprat or sardine fishery is carried on from Concarneau, on the coast of Brittany, 2500 boats and 11,000 fishermen being engaged in that particular sea-industry. As many as 80,000 barrels of sprats, each barrel containing 3000 of these fish, have been cured in various ways in one year at Concarneau, besides the large quantities sold fresh, and the countless thousands which, boiled in oil, are sent out as sardines. The ground is baited for the sprats with vast quantities of cod-roe, brought from Norway. It is an old idea that the Lord Mayor of London's inaugural banquet is never complete without a dish of sprats. An enormous number of sprats is used in the great metropolis. Mr Mayhew, in his work on London Labour and the London Poor, calculated that as many as 4,000,000 pounds' weight of these fish were annually vended by the costermongers.

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS AND FIGURES.

It is impossible to do more than estimate roughly the quantity of herrings caught yearly in the British seas. The Fishery Board takes cognizance only of those that are cured. Speaking roundly, the number of barrels annually cured in the British Islands is a million, each barrel containing 700 herrings. Now, it is not an unreasonable assumption, that an equal quantity is consumed fresh and in other forms not coming within the official returns, and thus we have our seas yielding us the inconceivable number of 1400 millions of one fish; which, at eightpence a dozen, represents a value of nearly four millions of pounds! Notwithstanding this enormous supply, herrings

are yearly becoming dearer. In the good old times-not so long ago either four a penny' was a common price; at present (1868-69), the cost rules at about three for twopence; so that the herring is no longer the poor man's fish. Indeed, the poor man has no fish now, for even sprats have become scarce, and consequently dear. The increase in price might be partly accounted for by the extended range of consumption, owing to the facilities afforded by railways for sending the fish in a fresh state to distant towns. But there is more in it than this; the fish are becoming scarce, or more difficult to catch. The fleet of boats engaged in the herring-fishery is twice as great as it was fifty years ago, and the netting of each boat has been doubled; but the capture is far from keeping pace with this increase of apparatus and labour. In the year 1820, the Wick fleet numbered 604, and each boat had on an average 148 crans; in 1868, there were 983 boats, and the average was only 44

crans.

Opinions are divided as to the cause of this falling-off in the productiveness of the herring-fields. One set of economists attribute it to 'over-fishing,' which is actually, they think, exhausting and breaking up the shoals. Others laugh at this as a mere baseless theory, and an absurd one too. They hold that the shoals are so vast, that it is impossible for man to make any impression on them though he were to multiply his machinery of capture tenfold, and maintain that herrings are as plentiful in the sea as ever, only that they are more difficult to find. The other side reply, that the admitted fact of the fish becoming more and more difficult to find, is a proof that man is making an impression of some kind on the shoals; and that to hold that the fish are not diminished in numbers is a gratuitous assumption. It is an indisputable fact, that certain shoals have been destroyed: the July fishery at Wick, which at one time yielded from twenty to thirty thousand barrels, has dwindled away to a tenth of that quantity, which undoubtedly shews that that particular shoal is becoming exhausted.

THE WHALE-FISHERY.

THE whale-fishery at one time bulked largely in the proceeds of the sea-harvest of Britain; but although the return of the whaling-ships is still announced with interest in the local newspapers, it is no longer felt to mean, as it once did, the success or failure of a great national industry. Forty years ago, as many as 160 vessels of large tonnage left British ports for this pursuit; owing to long-continued want of success, the number is now reduced to less than a third. Luckily for the world, several substitutes for whale-oil have come

into extensive use-namely, gas for lighting, and petroleum in its various modifications both for lighting and lubrication. There are, however, two or three manufactures, notably the preparation of jute, for which fish-oil is essential; so that the article is still valuable, and would pay well if the fish were as readily found as they once were. It is chiefly from the ports of Peterhead and Dundee that the British whale-fishery continues to be prosecuted.

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE WHALE.

The name whale is popularly applied to a good many of the larger kinds of the order of animals called by naturalists Cetaceans or Cetacea. These cetaceans, although living in water and having a fish-like form, are not fishes proper; they belong to the class Mammalia, for they have warm blood, breathe by lungs and not by gills, and bring forth their young alive and suckle them. One section of this order are herbivorous, and are not allowed by some naturalists to be cetaceans proper. Setting them aside, the ordinary or true cetaceans are divided into three families: 1. The Delphinida, containing the Dolphin, the Porpoise, the Bottlenose or Bottlehead, the Narwhal, &c. 2. The Physeteride or Catodontida. Of this family only one member seems to be known-namely, the_Cacholot or Spermaceti Whale. 3. The Balanida, containing the Greenland Whale, the Rorqual, &c.

These creatures all feed on animal food, some of them pursuing and devouring fishes; others, and these the largest, subsisting chiefly on smaller prey, molluscs, small crustaceans, and even zoophytes, which they strain out of the water by a peculiar apparatus in their mouths. None of the true cetacea have molar teeth or grinders; all the teeth which any of them have are conical, but some of the largest are entirely destitute of teeth. The fore-limbs of the true cetacea are mere fins. The resemblance to fishes is increased in many of them by the presence of a dorsal fin. There is a wonderful provision to enable them to spend some time under water, before returning again to the surface to breathe-an arterial plexus or prodigious intertwining of branches of arteries, under the pleura and between the ribs, on each side of the spine. This being filled with oxygenated blood after the animal has spent some time at the surface breathing, the wants of the system are supplied from it whilst breathing is suspended, so that some whales can remain below even for an hour. The position of the nostrils is remarkable, almost on the very top of the head, so that the animal can breathe as soon as the head comes to the surface of the water; and the nostrils are furnished with a valve of singular but very perfect construction, a sort of conical stopper of fibrous substance, preventing the ingress of water even under the pressure of the greatest depths. The nostrils appear to be little

used for the purpose of smelling, the sense of smell being one which these animals either do not possess at all, or in a very imperfect degree; but they are much used, not only for breathing, but also for spouting, or the ejection of water from the mouth, for which reason they are generally called blow-holes. The height to which the water is thrown into the air is extraordinary, and the spouting of the whale is one of those wonders of the ocean never to be forgotten by those who have seen it.

A peculiarity in the skin of the true cetacea adapts them for their manner of life. The skin is extremely thick, the inner part of it consisting of elastic fibres interlacing each other in every direction, the interstices of which are filled with oil, forming the substance usually called blubber. The oil deposited in this unusual situation, not only serves the ordinary purposes of fat, but that also of keeping the body warm, which to a warm-blooded animal, continually surrounded with water, is of great importance; whilst the elasticity of this extraordinary skin affords protection in the great depths to which some of the whales descend, and in which the pressure must sometimes be enormous.

It is chiefly, however, with two members of the order that we have at present to do, as they alone have been the object of systematic pursuit-namely, the Greenland or 'Right' Whale (Balæna mysticetus), and the Cacholot or Spermaceti Whale (Physeter or Catodon macrocephalus).

The species of the genus Balana, to which the Greenland whale belongs, are entirely destitute of teeth, instead of which the palate is furnished with an apparatus of baleen or whalebone, for the purpose of straining out of the water the small crustaceans and jelly-fish which form the food of these whales. The plates of whalebone in the mouth of a single whale amount to several hundreds on each side of the mouth, and weigh sometimes as much as two tons. They are suspended from the roof of the mouth; none proceed from the lower jaw. They extend on each side from the middle line of the palate, like the barbs of a feather; the base of each plate is embedded in the substance of the membrane that covers the palate, whilst its edge forms a loose fringe, composed of fibres or pliant bristles. The vast mouth being opened, water is taken in ; and the small animals which enter with it being retained for food, the water is allowed to escape by the sides of the mouth.

The tongue is a soft thick mass, not extending beyond the back of the mouth. The gullet of these whales is very narrow; it is said not to be more than an inch and a half in diameter even in a large whale, so that only very small animals can pass through it. The head occupies from a third to a fourth of the whole length. The skull is unsymmetrical, the right side being larger than the left. The flesh is red, firm, and coarse. The skin is naked, with the exception of

a few bristles about the jaws, and its surface is moistened by an oily fluid. The lower surface of the true skin extends into a thick layer of blubber. The blubber is from a foot to two feet in thickness, the whole mass in a large whale sometimes weighing more than thirty

tons.

It has been attempted to calculate the age of whales from the transverse lines on the plates of baleen, and in this way it has been computed that they attain the age of 800 or 900 years, each transverse line being assumed to indicate an annual check of growth; but it is evident that there is no good ground for the assumption on which such calculation proceeds.

The Greenland or 'right' whale, which is the most important species of the genus, and indeed the most important of all whales, abounds chiefly in the frozen regions of the north; and although it is sometimes seen on the coasts of Britain, and even farther south, the warm seas of the tropics are to it as a wall of fire which it never crosses. The whale which is captured on the coasts of South Africa, New Zealand, and other parts of the southern hemisphere, is a distinct species, distinguished as the Cape Whale (Balana Australis), although resembling the whale of the north both in size and appearance. The size of the Greenland whale was at one time greatly exaggerated, its length being described as from 100 to 120 feet. It is seldom, however, that it exceeds sixty feet. The tail is five or six feet long, and from twenty to twenty-five feet broad. The mouth is fifteen or sixteen feet long. The eyes are not larger than those of an ox, but the sight is acute. The upper parts of the body are black, the under white. The 'cow '-whale produces only one 'calf' or young one at a time, which is from ten to fourteen feet long when born; but the period of gestation is uncertain. The mother displays great affection for her offspring, of which whale-fishers sometimes take undue advantage, harpooning the young one-itself of little valuein order to secure the mother. Suckling is performed at the surface of the water, and the mother rolls from side to side, that she and the young one may be able to breathe in turn. The usual rate of progress in swimming is about four or five miles an hour, and whales often swim not far beneath the surface of the water, with the mouth wide open to take in water from which to sift food. The whale is capable, however, of swimming with much greater rapidity, and when harpooned, it often descends to a great depth in a few seconds. Its tail is extremely powerful, and a single blow of it is sufficient to destroy a large boat, or toss it and its crew into the air, so that the whale-fishery is attended with no little danger. Whales usually come to the surface to breathe at intervals of eight or ten minutes, but they are capable of remaining under water for half an hour or more. When they come up to breathe, they generally remain on the surface about two minutes, during which they blow eight or nine