132 THE COMMERCIAL SEA FISHES OF 



to sand-eels, herrings, sprats, and the spawn of herrings, 

 also crustaceous and testaceous animals, and, as is well 

 known to fishermen, evidently preferring one sort of animal 

 food to another, being very partial to crabs and whelks, 

 while their digestion is so powerful that the greater portion 

 of the shells they swallow are dissolved. They often dis- 

 gorge their food when hooked and being drawn on board. 

 In the North Sea they frequently feed at night-time on the 

 herrings meshed in the drift-nets, doing much damage to 

 the light cotton nets ; while off Devonshire and Cornwall 

 they feast extensively upon pilchards during the autumnal 

 migration. The contents of their stomachs are almost 

 infinite : from one captured in Lynn Deeps on Midsummer- 

 eve, 1626, and brought to the Vice- Chancellor of Cam- 

 bridge, was taken a book in three treatises ; from another, 

 Captain Hill recovered his keys several days after he had 

 dropped them overboard from a North Sea trawler very 

 many miles distant from where they had been lost. An 

 entire partridge was taken from the stomach of one. 

 Johnston observed that a fisherman caught a cod having 

 a hare in its stomach ; while another had a white turnip. 

 Mr. Reid, of Wick, saw a black guillemot in perfect feather 

 removed from the stomach of one of these fishes in March, 

 1879 ; while Mr. Grove took a piece of tallow candle seven 

 inches long from the inside of a cod. Stones and similar 

 indigestible substances are frequently found in their di- 

 gestive cavities, and which have probably been swallowed 

 in order to obtain the corallines which were attached to 

 them ; it subsequently rejects the stones, &c. Couch ob- 

 served six picked dog-fishes, each nine inches long, removed 

 from inside another ; while he records numerous species of 

 stalk-eyed Crustacea taken from examples captured in the 

 west portion of the British Channel. A Norway lobster 





