THE DOG-FISH AND THE HAKE. 235 



fishes. Occasionally only a few escape with their heads, the 

 tails of others are snapped off, and pieces bitten out of the 

 belly. A cod-fish sometimes comes up a mere skeleton, 

 stripped to the bone on both sides. 



The Dog-fish attains a length of three or four feet, and is 

 found in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the South seas. 

 One of the most abundant species on English coasts is the 

 common dog-fish, which sometimes appears in prodigious 

 numbers, twenty thousand having been taken at Cornwall 

 at one time in a net, and the fishermen of the Orkneys and 

 Hebrides, where they are much used for food, sometimes, 

 load their boats to the water's edge with them. 



Another voracious enemy of the herring (and the pil- 

 chard) is the Hake, a member of the Cod family, with the 

 same predatory instincts. It is sometimes three or four feet 

 in length, coarse in quality, but valuable as a " stock" fislu 

 It is generally taken by lines, like cod and ling, but in the 

 spawning season, when it keeps near the bottom, it is some- 

 times caught by trawl-nets. 



Allied to the herring, but differing in some respects, 

 being nearly equal in size, but rather thicker, and the lines 

 of the back and belly being straighter, the scales also being 

 larger and fewer, is the Pilchard, a fish also of immense im- 

 portance in the British fisheries, and plentiful on the coasts 

 of Devonshire and Cornwall. These fish congregate in deep 

 waters, within limits extending from the Scilly Isles, as far, 

 sometimes, as the Irish, Welsh and Cornish coasts. A por- 

 tion strikes the land north of Cape Cornwall, and turns in a 

 north-easterly direction toward St. Ives, constituting its 

 summer fishery. The great bulk passes between the Scilly 

 Islands and the mainland. " To look from Cape Cornwall,'^ 

 says an eye-witness, "or from any of the high lands of St. 

 Just, and see this immense mass of fishes, extending as far 

 as the eye can reacli, approaching the shores and reddening 



