292 The Field Naturalist's Qttarterly Nov. 



New York city, has caught sawfish, if I remember right, up to 

 500 lb. and 600 lb., while the heaviest tarpon would prob- 

 ably fall short of 200 lb. There is also another great angler's 

 fish in those seas, the tuna, which is, I believe, identical 

 with the tunny of the Mediterranean and other waters in 

 Southern Europe. It will be noticed that many fish families 

 are represented by these giants. The tuna is a distant rela- 

 tion of the mackerel ; the tarpon of the herring, though 

 anything like relationship between the tiny whitebait and the 

 massive tarpon may smack of paradox. The great sea-bass 

 is a kinsman, though a remote one, of our little river perch, 

 and, more nearly, of our own sea-bass at home. The sawfish, 

 of course, is one of the shark family, in which there are some 

 far greater monsters, not, however, associated, even indi- 

 rectly, with fishing for sport. The halibut is one of the 

 flatfish, and it even grows to a moderately large size in our 

 own seas, and more particularly in those colder waters in 

 the neighbourhood of Iceland, increasingly exploited by our 

 fishing-boats. When we compare these gigantic fishes with 

 the smallest living fish known, a tiny creature found, I be- 

 lieve, in the inland waters of the Philippines, and measuring 

 in its adult form only about a quarter of an inch, we find 

 indeed a marvellous range of size. Yet the lilliputian in 

 question is as perfect as the brobdingnagians aforementioned, 

 and doubtless it lives its life and reproduces its species as 

 completely and as usefully as they do. The battle may be 

 to brawn and muscle in some classes of animals, but, in the 

 absence of greater enemies, a small fish is as good, from its 

 own standpoint, as a large one any day ! 



II. Winter Fish Movements at Sea. — Those who know how 

 to read the signs and portents find the phenomenon of 

 migration as interesting every whit among our fishes as it is 

 among the more conspicuous birds. Most of us are familiar 

 with the yearly departure of the swallows and martins, the 

 twittering little travellers massing on our south coast head- 

 lands and of a sudden leaving our shores in their thousands, 

 old and young, for the milder winter of northern Africa. 

 The winter arrivals of ducks and geese and the other feathered 

 folk frozen out of arctic ice-fields are less observed, chiefly 



