124 SALT-WATER FISHES 



when they find hook after hook robbed by chad, the latter 

 being too small-mouthed for capture on a pollack-hook, often 

 give their lines a terrific jerk, more in helpless anger than with 

 any hope of hooking the chad. The result of this impetuous 

 movement is that every now and then, when a small bream 

 happens at the moment to be sucking at the bait which is too 

 large for it to swallow, the upper jaw of the fish is torn away, 

 and in the course of years these maimed bream — which are not 

 debarred from finding nourishment, henceforth living on soft 

 food by a process closely resembling suction — grow, and are 

 finally caught in that neighbourhood. The interest of this 

 explanation is not confined to its accounting for the deformed 

 mouth in these bream. It also shows, since we know the 

 breams to be migratory, at any rate to the extent of leaving 

 our shores in winter, either that the individuals thus handi- 

 capped prefer to remain in the neighbourhood rather than 

 wander with their whole fellows, or else that the breams 

 generally, though wanderers, return year after year to the 

 same neighbourhood. In accepting this almost legitimate 

 deduction, it should, however, be borne in mind that in all 

 probability the fishermen of other districts, say on the south 

 coast of Ireland, are equally impatient, and tear the jaws of 

 bream in precisely the same way as is done in Cornwall, so 

 that these malformed bream taken at Plymouth might have 

 received their wounds elsewhere. 



Whether the prickly little chad is to any great extent 

 preyed upon by pollack, the fact remains that one side of a 

 chad is an excellent bait for that fish. It is always used 

 when the chads themselves meet the descending hooks a few 

 fathoms below the surface and remove the soft pilchard baits 

 before they have reached the lower level at which the pollack 

 are feeding. At other times the reverse happens, and the 

 baits go too far, passing the pollack in mid-water, only to be 

 robbed by the chads below. 



The breams of our seas fall under four genera. Of the 



