20 SALMON GROWTH VCTSUS COD GROWTH. [CHAP. i. 



salmon, but so little progress is being made in observing the 

 natural history of fish that we cannot expect for some time to 

 know much more than we do at present ; everything in the 

 fish world seems so much to be taken for granted that we are 

 still inclined rather to revive the old traditions than to study 

 or search out new facts. Naturalists are so ignorant of how 

 the work of growth is carried on in the fish world in fact, it 

 is so difficult to investigate points of natural history in the 

 depths of the sea that we cannot wonder at less being known 

 about marine animals than about any other class of living 

 beings. 



It is the want of precise information about the growth 

 of the fish that has of late been telling heavily against our 

 fisheries, for in the meantime all is fish that comes to the 

 fisherman's net, no matter of what size the animals may be, 

 or whether or not they have been allowed time to perpetuate 

 their kind. No person, either naturalist or fisherman, knows 

 how long a period elapses from the date of its birth before a 

 turbot or cod-fish becomes reproductive. It is now well known, 

 in consequence of the repeated experiments made with that 

 fish, that the salmon grows with immense rapidity, a conse- 

 quence in some degree of its quick digestive power. The cod- 

 fish, again and I reason from the analogy of its greatly slower 

 power of digesting its food and from other corroborative cir- 

 cumstances must be correspondingly slow in its growth ; but 

 people must not, in consequence of this slow power of diges- 

 tion, believe all they hear about the miscellaneous articles 

 often said to be found in the stomach of a cod-fish, as a large 

 number of the curiosities found in the intestinal regions of 

 his codship are often placed there by fishermen, either by way 

 of joke or in order to increase the weight and so enhance the 

 price of the animal. 



As regards the natural history of one of our best-known 

 food fishes, I have taken the pains to compile a brief previs of 



