242 FISHERMEN'S OWN BOOK. 



An India Rubber Stomach. — The Chiasmodes Niger, brought in by sch. 

 Bessie W. Somes, July 30, 1880, proved a rare specimen indeed, since it is a 

 fish that can swallow fishes twice as large and four times as heavy as itself. 

 This it can do because its mouth is very deeply cleft, its teeth bent, and its 

 stomach elastic like India rubber. This is the third specimen known to 

 science, the first having been found off the island of Madeira, and the sec- 

 ond in the Dominican Sea. The specimen brought in by the Soifics was 

 ten inches long, and had in its stomach a codfish eighteen inches in length. 



Eccentricities of the Swordfish. — The swordfish is found here and 

 there from Spring to Fall in the ocean on our coast, lying " asleep," the 

 fishermen call it, on the very surface of the water. Nobody on the Ameri- 

 ican coast, so far as reported, ever saw a little swordfish. The smallest 

 recorded by a correspondent of the "Forest and Stream" weighed forty-six 

 pounds. Their only known breeding ground is in the Mediterranean Sea. 

 There the same fish is found weighing half a pound ; from that they go up 

 to very heavy measurement. It is naturally inferred from this that all our 

 swordfish are Mediterranean products. What mysterious ocean current 

 guides them over here ? Or is it instinct that teaches them that here they 

 will find the mackerel and the menhaden that they feed on ? One can al- 

 most imagine that the game of flight and pursuit kept up by these two spe- 

 cies starts at Gibralter and is run to Block Island every year. The sword- 

 fish darts upon a school of its prey and by skilful use of its sword wounds 

 those that it afterwards captures and eats. Until within a few years nobody 

 ever thought of catching it except by harpoons. Recently, however, it has 

 taken the bait of the trawls of our cod fishermen, and many swordfish have 

 been caught in that novel way. What they come up and "sleep" for is one 

 of the puzzles of their nature. They come and go as the mackerel and 

 menhaden do, and from that it is naturally concluded that they spend their 

 time chasing these small fish. What with sharks, swordfish, porpoises, blue- 

 fish, sea-gulls, eagles and seines, and all the rest after them, the fish of the 

 herring tribe have led such lives of fright and terror that it is no longer a 

 wonder that the movements of any school of them seem guided by an inher- 

 ent idiocy. It is even less strange that they are all the while victims than 

 that, being caught by millions yearly, they should steadily increase. 



Why the Red Sea Is Red. — Geographers were not able to determine 

 why the Red Sea was so named until Klirenberg, sailing over a part of it, 

 observed that the water of the whole Gulf of Tor was colored a blood red. 

 Drawing up some of the water, and examining it with a microscope, he 

 found that the color was due to a minute, thread like oscillatoria or alga. 

 The same alga was observed by Dupont twenty years afterwards, giving rise 



