ANCHOVIES IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL. 331 



gives a figure of tte anchovy, and states that he possessed a specimen 

 caught a few years previously on the coast of Hampshire. Ac- 

 cording to Day, Mr. Peach obtained it from the herring nets off 

 Wick ; and there is one in the Newcastle Museum found in 1834 

 among sprats in the Durham market. It is frequently taken in the 

 stow-nets in the river opposite Lynn, in Norfolk. It has also been 

 recorded from the coast of Essex and the mouth of the Thames. 

 Mr. Dunn, as quoted by Day, says that it is quite a common fish in 

 the autumn from Polperro to Falmouth. The same observer informed 

 Day, and he has also stated the same to myself, that in November, 

 1871, he witnessed the capture of at least 150,000 in a pilchard seine 

 at Mevagissey ; these were sold for almost nothing as manure. In 

 Wales it has been recorded off Glamorganshire, and as abundant in 

 some seasons at Swansea. It has also been taken on the Irish coast. 

 Couch, in his Fishes of the British Islands, vol. iv, published in 1864, 

 gives a figure and a chapter on the anchovy. I cannot do better 

 than quote what he says on the subject : — " In the westmost por- 

 tion of the British Channel these fish are often taken in drift-nets 

 employed in the fishery for herrings and pilchards ; but this is only 

 when they are sufficiently large to become entangled in the meshes 

 as these chance to be doubled together ; and there is sufficient evi- 

 dence to show that if nets of finer twine, with meshes of proper size, 

 were employed, sufficient might be taken on the coast of Cornwall 

 to supply the full amount of what is consumed in our own country, the 

 whole of which, as sent to us from the Mediterranean, has been 

 so much as, with a tax on the importation of twopence in the pound, to 

 bring into the Exchequer year by year the sum of £1764. As I'egards 

 the time when these fish are near us, I have met with an example in 

 March from the stomach of a mackerel ; in summer they are found 

 at St. Ives, in the ground scans employed in catching launce.^' 



The mode of reproduction and development of the anchovy was 

 first ascertained by a Dutch zoologist, K. F. Wenckebach, in 1886. 

 The investigation was carried out at the Zoological Station of the 

 Nederlandsche Dierkundige Vereenigung (Dutch Zoological Asso- 

 ciation) established in the summer of that year at Nieuwediep, which 

 is on the west side of the entrance of the Zuyder Zee. Prof. C. K. 

 Hoffmann had previously ascertained that the anchovies in the Zuyder 

 Zee were sexually ripe in the months of June and July, that the eggs 

 taken from the ripe ovaries were of oval form, about 1 mm. long and 

 perfectly transparent ; but he had not succeeded either in findino- 

 fertilized eggs undergoing development in the natural conditions, nor 

 in artificially fertilizing them. Wenckebach inferred from the trans- 

 parency of the eggs that they were probably pelagic, and developed 

 while suspended in the surface waters of the sea. He therefore tried 



