THE HERRING FAMILY 



205 



radiating lines on the gill-cover to distinguish it from the 

 herring, and it also has large, loosely attached scales, a more 

 rounded body, and a deeper green hue. Its extremely small 

 teeth occur in the jaws only, and in some individuals they 

 appear to be altogether wanting. 



The sardine of our tables is merely a year-old, immature 

 pilchard, masquerading under the French name. This seems 

 to be derived from the fisheries round the island of Sardinia. 

 Unlike the herring, the pilchard occurs abundantly in the 

 Mediterranean. 



Dunn described its floating egg as far back as 1871, and 

 seventeen years later Raffaele thought that he had identified the 

 similar egg of the sardine in the Mediterranean — a conclusion 

 confirmed by Cunningham somewhat later. The pilchard is 

 said to deposit about 60,000 eggs, and Cunningham observed 

 these artificially fertilised for the first time in 1893. He draws 

 attention to three very useful characters by which they can be 

 distinguished from any other eggs that float in our seas — the 

 great space between the egg and the surrounding membrane, 

 the division of the yolk into irregularly shaped segments, and 

 the presence in the yolk of a single large oil-globule. There 

 are, it is true, other eggs with one or other of these three 

 characters, but no other possesses them all. 



The same author also gives excellent figures of the remark- 

 able larval and post-larval stages through which the pilchard 

 passes. It is satisfactory to learn, in an age that afFects to 

 deprecate British science, that the scientific experts of the 

 Plymouth Marine Laboratory solved, in the course of a five 

 years' investigation, pilchard problems which eminent French 

 ichthyologists at Marseilles had declared to be incapable of 

 solution close to land. 



It would seem that the migrations of the pilchard are less 

 extensive on our coasts than those of the herring. As an 

 interesting case of irregular distribution, it may be mentioned 

 that this fish was common on the east coast of Scotland during 



