THE HERRING FAMILY. 397 



Most familiar of them all is the Herring, which has been 

 cured in a variety of ways for centuries, involving a traffic 

 of such magnitude that more than one Con- 

 Lng< tinental city derived its revenues in the Middle 

 Ages from no other source. The herring reaches a length 

 of about 17 inches in the north, 12^ inches in the southern 

 waters (Cunningham). In the Baltic I noticed that all the 

 herrings were invariably small. Our best herrings come 

 from the east coast of Scotland. Unlike the eels, the males 

 are said to have slightly the advantage both in size and 

 numbers. The chief characters of the herring are the large 

 thin scales, absence of lateral line, and keeled belly. The 

 teeth of this fish are minute, and its food consists of small 

 floating organisms. The water is filtered through gill-rakers, 

 the function of which is not unlike that of the baleen in 

 whales ; and this mode of feeding is characteristic of the 

 family. The migrations of the herring are even now im- 

 perfectly understood. It was formerly thought to per- 

 form journeys of great duration, and the older writers went 

 to the trouble of describing those pilgrimages to and from 

 the arctic seas with an attention to detail that did credit 

 to their imagination. The later theory, however, is that 

 they simply move to and from the deeper water in search 

 of warmth or food. The spawning-time appears to extend 

 over the greater portion of the year according to locality, 

 but it is not probable that the same fish spawns twice in 

 the year. The eggs, unlike those of our other food-fishes, 

 sink to the bottom, where they adhere to stones and are 

 devoured wholesale by cod, haddock, and other ground- 

 fish. 1 Cunningham 2 gives a most interesting account 

 of the spawning of the various races of herring and the 

 development of the larvae. The so-called "Whitebait," 

 formerly regarded as a distinct species, is now known to 

 consist of the fry of herrings and sprats, the herrings pre- 



1 M'Intosh and Master-man, Life - Histories of the British Marine 

 Food-Fishes, p. 15. 



2 Marketable Marine Fishes, pp. 151-163. 



