COD, HADDOCKS, WHITING, BREAM, ETC 417 



food supply of its own, contained in an umbilical sac. 1 When 

 this has been exhausted the young cod, now an inch long, come 

 shorewards and feed and are fed on, many millions doubtless 

 being eaten by larger fish and sea birds. When a year old they 

 seek deeper water. Fishermen call anything under twenty 

 inches codling, from twenty to thirty inches sprags, then come 

 half cod, and then cod. They are such voracious feeders, and 

 the sea is such a good feeding ground, that their growth is 

 undoubtedly very rapid. According to Jackson, some cod 

 which were in the Southport Aquarium grew from three-quarters 

 of a pound to six or seven pounds each in a period of about 

 sixteen months, and they would without much doubt grow still 

 faster in the sea. 



In the matter of food the cod is the ostrich of the sea. 

 Whether a tenpenny nail or a soda-water bottle has yet been 

 discovered in one of these fish I do not know ; but if keys, why 

 not tenpenny nails ? For there is a very pleasant story of a 

 certain Captain Hill who dropped a bunch of keys overboard 

 from a trawler in the North Sea, and weeks afterwards found 

 them again in the belly of a codfish captured miles away. 

 Live crabs are not pleasant things to swallow, one would think, 

 but cod take them readily enough, and in a Scotch cod was 

 found an entire Norway lobster. Dr. Day recorded how one 

 Grove took a piece of candle seven inches long from the inside 

 of a cod, and how Mr. Reid, of Wick, saw a black guillemot in 

 perfect feather removed from the stomach of one of these fish 

 in March 1879. Cod often play the marauder, and rival the 

 cuttle-fish by feeding on the herrings which have been meshed 



1 At Dunbar, N.B. , is a hatchery instituted at an expenditure of only i,6oo/. 

 and costing annually about 6oo/. Up to the present its managers have hatched 

 and planted in the sea 69,585,000 fry of various sea fish, of which this year (189 5) 

 nearly three millions were cod. Why does not the Government establish fifteen 

 or twenty such hatcheries ? The comparatively small outlay required would 

 soon be repaid twenty-fold. J. B. 



