THE BASS, BREAMS, AND RED MULLET 123 



at the surface ; but this is not generally corroborated, and 

 can, at any rate, not be a common phenomenon. 



It is in connection with this fish that, with the aid of 

 Matthias Dunn, Mr. Garstang, of the Plymouth Marine 

 Laboratory, was able to offer a most interesting explana- 

 tion of the malformed fish so common in Plymouth 

 Sound and neighbourhood. If every discovery and theory 

 in connection with the life-history of our sea fish for 

 which the late Mr. Dunn was answerable were brought 

 together under one cover, what a marvellous record of first- 

 hand observation and ingenious deduction we should have! 

 and how favourably his credentials would compare with those 

 of many who, on the strength of a polite education, which he 

 lacked, have taken far higher rank among marine naturalists ! 

 Any student of our sea fish must continually be struck not 

 only by the acknowledgments of every marine biologist, from 

 Couch to Cunningham, but also by the notes and articles 

 which that remarkable man, who served his time on a pilchard 

 boat, published in the Transactions of scientific societies. To 

 the writer, who enjoyed the rare pleasure of his acquaintance 

 during the last eight years of his lite, his death, in the summer 

 of 1 90 1, brought added grief, for on the last occasion of their 

 meeting Dunn had promised to think seriously of writing a 

 great work on British fishes. Such a volume would have been 

 a worthy successor to Day's standard work ; but Dunn, unfor- 

 tunately, had much other business to engage his time and was 

 never able to get beyond the preliminary ground-work. His 

 theory on the subject of malformed bream was published in 

 the following circumstances. Mr. Garstang had long been 

 puzzled by the continual recurrence in Plymouth waters of 

 peculiarly deformed bream, which had to all appearance lost 

 their upper jaw, and thus gave the impression, when viewed 

 in profile, of being short-nosed or tube-mouthed. Mr. Dunn 

 offered a very simple explanation of this phenomenon. He 

 told Garstang that the pollack fishermen, increasingly impatient 



