33? THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and old sailors will in good faith describe the enormous fish which 

 they saw at sea but could not capture ; one well-authenticated instance 

 of accurate weighing, however, is much more valuable. The average 

 extreme length seems to be eleven feet, of which the sword is nearly 

 four feet. A fish has been taken by Captain Benjamin Ashby, a New 

 England sword-fisherman, whose sword measured almost six feet. The 

 fish when salted weighed six hundred and thirty-nine pounds, so that 

 its live weight must have been as much as seven hundred and fifty 

 pounds. 



The sword-fish ranges along the Atlantic coast of America from 

 Jamaica to Nova Scotia ; it is abundant on the shores of Western 

 Europe, entering the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, and is found also 

 on the west coast of Africa, about New Zealand, and along the Pacific 

 coast of America from Peru to California. On the coasts of Maine, 

 Massachusetts, and Rhode Island they abound in the summer months ; 

 their occurrence off New York is not unusual, but in our Southern 

 waters they do not appear to remain. 



A sword-fish when swimming near the surface usually allows its 

 dorsal fin and the upper lobe of its caudal fin to stand out of the 

 water several inches. It is this habit which enables the fisherman to 

 detect the presence of the fish. It commonly swims so slowly that a 

 fishing-smack with a light breeze has no difficulty in overtaking it, 

 but when excited its motions are very rapid and violent. Many curi- 

 ous instances are on record of attacks by this fish upon ships, ^lian, 

 who wrote a little later than 200 a. d., says that the sword-fish has a 

 sharp-pointed snout with which it is able to pierce the sides of a 

 ship and send it to the bottom. He describes the sword as like 

 the beak of the ship known as the trireme, which was rowed with 

 three banks of oars. In 1871 the little yacht Redhot, of New Bed- 

 ford, was out sword-fishing, and a sword-fish had been hauled in to 

 be lanced, when it attacked the vessel and pierced her side so as to 

 sink her. The London "Daily News" of December 11, 1868, con- 

 tained the following paragraph, probably from the pen of Professor 

 R. A. Proctor : " Last Wednesday the Court of Common Pleas — rather 

 a strange place, by-the-by, for inquiring into the natural history of 

 fishes — was engaged for several hours in trying to determine under 

 what circumstances a sword-fish might be able to escape scot-free after 

 thrusting his snout into the side of a ship. The gallant ship Dread- 

 naught, thoroughly repaired and classed A 1 at Lloyd's, had been in- 

 sured for three thousand pounds against all the risks of the seas. She 

 sailed March 10, 1864, from Colombo for London. Three days later 

 the crew while fishing hooked a sword-fish. Xiphias, however, broke 

 the line, and a few moments after leaped half out of the water, with the 

 object, it should seem, of taking a look at his persecutor, the Dread- 

 naught. Probably he satisfied himself that the enemy was some ab- 

 normally large cetacean, which it was his natural duty to attack forth- 



