MACKERELS, HORSE-MACKERELS, ALLIED FORMS 139 



mouth Pier on calm summer mornings before the water has 

 been* disturbed by hohday traffic, and he can only confirm 

 Cunningham's account as absolutely faithful to nature. The 

 grotesque fish foreshortens to little more than a blurred line, 

 and in that guise it advances with little, unobtrusive jerks, 

 gradually approaching the sand-eels and atherines that swarm 

 among the weed-covered piles. Then, quite suddenly, it 

 shoots out its tube-shaped mouth like a telescope, or rather 

 like those Japanese fishing-rods that may be blown out, joint 

 by joint, from the hollow butt, and the nearest small fish is 

 seized. So cleverly does the dory sometimes contrive the 

 assault that the others continue to play unsuspectingly in its 

 immediate neighbourhood, though it does not commonly take 

 advantage of this to capture a second before some little interval 

 has elapsed. 



This sort of stratagem suits the dory's organisation, for 

 it is only a poor swimmer, and much of its so-called 

 " migration " — we know that it appears on different parts 

 of the coast at stated seasons, so that it is rightly regarded 

 as a wandering fish — is probably performed by drifting. A 

 single rough day is sufficient to clear the inshore waters 

 (for example, under the pier above mentioned) of dories 

 for days, so that the fish is probably quite unable to hold 

 its own in those most desirable feeding-grounds when the 

 shallow water is stirred to its bed by rollers sweeping through 

 the iron girders. 



The breeding of the dory has apparently been little 

 studied, and the supposed period of the dory's spawning 

 is one of the few points on which Matthias Dunn and 

 Cunningham disagree, for, whereas Dunn considered winter 

 to be its breeding-time, Cunningham thinks that it must 

 spawn in summer. The evidence in either case seems rather 

 circumstantial, Cunningham's strongest authority being the 

 assumption that the small dories, measuring from 5 to 

 7 in., which are trawled in Plymouth Sound between June 



