Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/379

Rh In China, Japan seeks no unfair advantage. She asks no favor from China that is not granted to England or the United States or to the entire world. With England and the United States she stands for the open door and, in the words of your great President, "square deal."

Under these conditions Japan is willing to take her chances in the rivalry of trade. We believe in the survival of the fittest in trade as well as in social development. If, in a fair field, we cannot hold our own position we shall be crowded out of the race, and it is right we should be. But we know that the trade of China is large enough for us all; that we can all share in it to our profit as well as to that of China, and instead of building on the ruins of a rival, we can build side by side for mutual advantage.

FF the New England coast a curious object is often found floating on the water, somewhat resembling a lady's veil of gigantic size and of a violet or purple color. The fishermen allude to it generally as the "purple veil," and many have been the speculations concerning its nature and origin. In 1871 the late Prof. Spencer F. Baird had the opportunity of examining one of these objects at sea, and he found it to present the appearance "of a continuous sheet of a purplish-brown color, 20 or 30 feet in length and 4 or 5 feet in width, composed of a mucous substance, which was perfectly transparent, to which, as a whole, a purple color was imparted by the presence of specks distributed uniformly throughout the mass to the number of about thirty or more to the square inch."

On examining the substance with a magnifying glass it was found that each little speck consisted of an embryonic fish, moving vigorously within the narrow limits of a little cell in the jellylike mass, so that it was obvious that the purple veil, as a whole, was the egg-mass of a fish.

It is somewhat startling to be told, by so good an authority as Dr Theodore Gill, that the purple veil is the product of a single fish, and not so very large a fish either, as it rarely exceeds 3 feet in length, and that as many as 1,000,000 eggs may be contained in a single egg-mass. By allowing the eggs to develop under observation, Alexander Agassiz succeeded in identifying the parent fish as the Lophius piscatorius—variously known as the "Goose-fish," the "Allmouth," or the "Angler," one of the most remarkable fishes in existence.

It derived its name of "Goose-fish" from its "having been known to swallow live geese," a statement almost incredible; but a reputable fisherman told the late G. Brown Goode that "he once saw a struggle in the water, and found that a Goose-fish had swallowed the head and neck of a large loon, which had pulled it to the surface

.—Three eggs embedded in the gelatinous membrane in which they are laid; magnified. (After A. Agassiz.)