COD, HADDOCKS, WHITING, BREAM, ETC 441 



waste them. They are not such excellent food as the silver 

 eel of our rivers, but the part next to the head is by no means 

 bad eating if stuffed, and stewed with a good gravy flavoured 

 with port wine. In any case the conger makes an excellent 

 stock for soup, any fishy flavour being absolutely non-existent. 

 I have a pleasant recollection of a very nice dish, something 

 between soup and water souchee, compounded by a Welsh 

 cook. The stock for it was made from conger, and in it was 

 chopped parsley and fragments of sand dabs. I was told that 

 congers kipper well, but have not yet tried the experiment. 



DOGFISH swarm all round our coasts, and their big cousins 

 the sharks, of various species, are less uncommon than is gene- 

 rally supposed. Many a saltwater angler has had his gear 

 carried away by BLUE SHARKS (Carcharias glaucus), which in 

 appearance closely resemble very large dogfish. They doubt- 

 less take their name from their colour, the back and upper 

 sides being a dark blue, shading down to white on the belly. 

 The snout is green. They are quite common off the Cornish 

 and Devon coasts, and are detested by the pilchard fishermen, 

 into whose nets they sometimes plunge and roll themselves up 

 amid the meshes, causing dire destruction of valuable property. 

 I have known them taken on conger lines in the Bristol 

 Channel. They are also caught occasionally on the Scotch 

 coasts, and are more or less common all round Ireland, par- 

 ticularly on the southern shores. 



These voracious beasts sometimes grow to between twenty 

 and thirty feet in .length, but in British waters are very rarely 

 of a size to do injury to human beings, unless, maybe, when 

 brought into a small boat they knock the fishermen overboard 

 by a blow from their powerful tails. Immediately they have 

 been captured they should be knocked on the snout, or other- 

 wise despatched. 



Sharks are as tenacious of life as cats. Couch tells a 



3 L 



