SOME STRANGE FISH 



fish " goes down " whole and living, and at once proceeds 

 to bite a way out for itself through the stomach, ribs, and 

 skin of the shark. 



Its under-skin secretes a beautiful red dye, which was 

 once much prized by the Indians of Brazil. The fish is 

 also found in the Indian and Pacific oceans. 



South American fishermen keep careful watch in the 

 pools at low tide for the hideous octopus or cuttle-fish, 

 which scarcely calls for a description, as everyone has 

 seen it in pictures or aquaria. Sailors and novelists tell 

 us horrible things about the misdeeds of the creature, 

 though many naturalists regard it as more or less harm- 

 less. To the fisherman it is rather a " find," both for the 

 sake of the valuable black pigment which it secretes and 

 also for its calcareous " shield," commonly known as the 

 cuttle-fish bone, which is reduced to powder and used as a 

 metal-burnisher. The small northern variety, called the 

 flying-squid, which the cod-fishers use as bait, has the 

 power of leaping to a height of fifteen or twenty feet 

 above the water. 



The savages of Tierra del Fuego subsist almost entirely 

 on fish, blubber, and seaweed. Here we must talk about 

 fish-wives, for it is the women who do almost all the fish- 

 ing, though the men sometimes paddle the canoes from 

 which much of the work is done. Generally speaking, 

 the women catch fish while the men gather molluscs from 

 the rocks, or drift about in their canoes on the chance of 

 finding a dead whale or seal. The women's lines consist, 

 as often as not, of lengths of their own hair braided and 

 joined ; some few use a fish-bone hook, but most of them 



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