62 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



tan, some orange in color. Two more feathers 

 were taken later, and four large ones were seen 

 passing, all heavily laden with the hemipteran ova. 

 Outside the rip I noticed four additional lots, in 

 the course of this trip, three on feathers and one 

 on a j^iece of wood. Nine out of the ten feathers 

 were white ones from the wings of boobies, the 

 tenth was brown, probably from an immature bird 

 of the same gi'oup. 



From the small boat on the same day we were 

 fortunate enough to catch in a pail one of the 

 enormous, smoky-grey egg masses, a dozen of 

 which I had seen floating by the ship. In a glass 

 aquarium it looked like some loose-textured sponge, 

 with great openings here and there like the 

 vacuoles in a sponge. The microscope showed vast 

 numbers of small fish eggs — a small bit teased into 

 a watch glass contained twelve hundred and 

 seventy-six. I was greatly disappointed at not 

 being able to rear some of these, but the aquarium 

 pump went wrong at this time and these, among 

 other specimens, were destroyed. Our curatrix of 

 larval fish had better luck with a few in a dish and 

 kept some alive for seven days. Certain charac- 

 ters seemed to stamp them as young Coryphcena, 

 but we could never be quite certain. 



The dominating fish of the whole Current Rip 

 were unquestionably young amber- jacks or yellow- 

 tails, the well-known game fish of the Pacific coast. 

 These were present in schools of tens of thousands, 

 each school keeping in dense formation, and mov- 

 ing with that inexplicable unanimity which has 



