16 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



questioned his conclusions as to the migrations. I have, 

 however, in the light of the distribution of this species and 

 of Holt's figures with reference to C. mirabilis, and taking 

 into consideration Dean's able account of C. Colliei, ventured 

 to suggest that he has been misled by an apparent 

 consistency in the results in a region where the fish is 

 scarce. The evidence appears to me to show that Chimaera 

 is a bathypelagic fish of the North Atlantic which migrates 

 in spring and summer towards the Continent of Europe, 

 spreading north and south to Iceland and to the Mediter- 

 ranean, and that during this migration the mature fish 

 spawn on the continental slope and plateau, some of them 

 reaching Norway. Reasons have been given for admitting 

 the possibility that the Norwegian spawners may turn out to 

 belong to a school which has been more or less completely 

 segregated from the Atlantic headquarters of the species. 



Note on the above Paper. 



Had my own paper been written dogmatically I could 

 better understand Professor Meek's criticism ; but that I 

 wrote with careful regard to the facts at hand, with a due 

 admission of their paucity, with a recognition of the complex 

 nature of the case, and a limitation to those points of it on 

 which my evidence bore, are all matters which are obvious to 

 me and in which my readers, I take it, will bear me out. 

 In some parts of his paper Professor Meek seems to me 

 but to repeat what I had said, in others he misunderstands 

 and misinterprets me. He permits himself to say that 

 when I began to write my paper I did not know " that the 

 home of the Chimaera is in the North Atlantic" though 

 this is a commonplace which no one ever denied, and of 

 which no student of fishes is ignorant. He says that my 

 " main contention appears to be that the Northern Chimaera 

 winters off the coast of Norway, etc. " ; that " the migration 

 is the catadromous one " ; and that the Chimaeras found off 

 the north-west of Scotland " come from Norway." I never 

 said a single one of these things. 



