FLOTSAM AND JETSAM 215 



out so brilliantly that the glass dish, our hands 

 and our faces were clearly outlined. Lin Segal 

 and I spent many evenings in this research 

 and recorded a great number of separate in- 

 teresting facts, which, like all pioneer work, must 

 be presented in their place without connection or 

 correlation. Out of the mass, however, there are 

 certain, ones which fall into orderly relationship, 

 and give a faint but tremendously suggestive hint 

 of the life which these fish lead in the darkness of 

 their underwater world. 



I shall consider only the slender-tailed lantern 

 fish (Myctophv/m coccoi) which I took in numbers 

 both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Imagine a 

 minnow (Colored Plate V), which is irides- 

 cent copper above and silvery white below, not 

 over two inches in length, with large eyes and 

 moderate fins. A full-grown fish weighed a gram, 

 which means that it would take about four hundred 

 and fifty to make a pound. It feeds on copepods, 

 sagitt^e and other minute plankton fry, and from 

 this food it generates energy to live, to fight, to 

 migrate up and down, to keep illumined one hun- 

 dred lights and to lay upwards of seventeen 

 hundred eggs. 



Scattered over the body are many small, round, 

 luminous organs, which we may divide into three 

 general sets. First, thirty-two ventral lights on 

 each side of the body, extending from the tip of 

 the lower jaw to the base of the tail; second, 

 twelve lateral lights arranged irregularly along the 

 head and body, and third, a series of four to eight 



