Suborder Heterosomata 491 



soon verified by the second appearance of the tail. We hove 

 out a dory, and two men went with her, taking with them a 

 pair of gaff -hooks. They soon returned, bringing not only the 

 halibut, which was a fine one of about seventy pounds weight, 

 but a small codfish which it had been trying to kill by striking 

 it with its tail. The codfish was quite exhausted by the repeated 

 blows and did not attempt to escape after its enemy had been cap- 

 tured. The halibut was so completely engaged in the pursuit 

 of the codfish that it paid no attention to the dory and was 

 easily captured.' 



" The females become heavy with roe near the middle of the 

 year, and about July and August are ready to spawn, although 

 'some fishermen say that they spawn at Christmas' or 'in the 

 month of January, when they are on the shoals.' The roe of 

 a large halibut which weighed 356 pounds weighed 44 pounds, 

 and indeed the ' ovaries of a large fish are too heavy to be lifted 

 by a man without considerable exertion, being often 2 feet or 

 more in length.' A portion of the roe 'representing a fair 

 average of the eggs, was weighed and found to contain 2185 

 eggs,' and the entire number would be 2,182,773." 



Closely allied to the halibut are numerous smaller forms 

 with more elongate body. The Greenland halibut, Reinhardtius 

 hippoglossoides, and the closely related species in Japan, 

 Reinhardtius matsuurce, differ from the halibut most obviously 

 in the straight lateral line. The arrow-toothed halibut, 

 Atheresthes stomias, lives in deeper waters in the North Pacific. 

 Its flesh is soft, the mouth very large, armed with arrow-shaped 

 teeth. The head in this species is less distorted than in any 

 of the others, the upper eye being on the edge of the disk in 

 front of the dorsal fin. For this reason it has been supposed 

 to be the most primitive of the living species, but these traits 

 are doubtless elusive and a result of degeneration. 



Eopsetta jordani is a smaller halibut-like fish, common on 

 the coast of California, an excellent food-fish, with firm white 

 flesh, sold in San Francisco restaurants under the very erroneous 

 name of "'English sole." Large numbers are dried by the 

 Chinese for export to China. A similar species, Hippoglossoides 

 plate ssoides, known as the "sand-dab," is common on both 

 shores of the North Atlantic, and several related species are 



