Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/126

116 like herrings in a barrel, thousands arid thousands of them, one on top of the other, a solid mass of living and sleeping solehood, only waiting for the adventurous fisherman to pull them up and take them to market. Man, treacherous man, crept upon their peaceful slumber unawares, and proceeded, like Macbeth, to murder sleep wholesale in the most unjustifiable and relentless manner. He dropped his lines into the Silver Pits the water there is too deep for dredging and hauled up the hapless drowsy creatures literally by the thousand till he had half exhausted the accumulated progeny of ages. The Silver Pits are still excellent winter fishing-grounds, but never again will they yield such immense fortunes as they did at the moment of their first exploration.

In 1848, when the California gold-fever was at its very height, some other lucky smack-owners hit upon a second deposit of solid soles, lying in layers on a small tract of coarse bottom near Flamborough Head, where they retired to hibernate, perhaps, in consequence of the hard treatment they had received in the Silver Pits. This new El Dorado of the fishing industry was appropriately nicknamed California, because it proved for the time being a very mine of gold to its fortunate discoverers. But, like the prototypal California on the Pacific coast, its natural wealth was soon exhausted; and, though it still yields a fair proportion of fish, its golden days are now fairly over.

Driven from the banks and pits by their incessant enemy, the trawler, the poor soles have now taken to depositing their spawn on the rough, rocky ground where the fishermen dare not follow them for fear of breaking their nets against the jagged ledges. These rocky spots are known as sanctuaries, and if it were not for them it is highly probable that sole au gratin would soon become an extinct animal on our London dinner-tables. Even to the sanctuaries, however, they are rudely followed, as Professor Huxley has shown, by their hereditary fishy foes, who eat the spawn, and so deprive the world of myriads upon myriads of unborn soles, consigned before their time to dull oblivion. Formerly, fishermen used to throw away these useless fish when caught; in future, they have strict orders from the inspectors of fisheries to kill them all wherever found.

However, even the remnant left by all enemies put together is quite sufficient to repeoplerepopulate [sic] the waters with a pleuronectid population with extraordinary rapidity. The fecundity of fish is indeed something almost incredible. The eggs of soles are extremely small—not so big as a grain of mustard-seed—and the roe of a one-pound fish usually contains as many as one hundred and thirty-four thousand of them. Turbot are even more surprisingly prolific: Frank Buckland was acquainted with one whose roe weighed five pounds nine ounces, and contained no less than fourteen million and odd eggs. It is a sad reflection that not more than one of these, on an average, ever lives to reach maturity. For if only two survived in