20 NATURAL HISTORY. 



voracious and a determined enemy of herrings, they fol- 

 low after these fish in great shoals ; therefore they are 

 often caught and sold at the same time in the sea-port 

 markets. They are taken in nets, mostly in the summer 

 at spawning time ; these nets, loaded with lead below, 

 and kept afloat by empty barrels above, and sometimes 

 more than a league in extent, are cast into the sea ; the 

 meshes are wide enough to receive the head of the fish, 

 but arrest and entangle it by the gills and fins. The 

 fishery is often conducted by torchlight, and many hun- 

 dreds are taken at a single haul. It is said that mack- 

 erel become blind i,n the winter, and that, during the 

 cold season they bury their heads in the mud, leaving a 

 third part of their bodies exposed. In a decaying state, 

 the mackerel emits a shining light ; the water in which 

 it has been boiled possesses the same phosphorescent 

 property. The flesh is very fat and well tasted, but will 

 not bear transportation, except salted, as it spoils easily. 

 Mackerels are also caught by hook and line. 

 "^*"fThe Tunny (scomber thynnus), plate 21, fig. 8, is 

 commonly two feet in length, and seven pounds in 

 weight, steel-gray on the back, elsewhere silvered, found 

 in all the seas, but abounds in the Mediterranean, where 

 it attains to the length of a man. None of the finny 

 tribes are so rapacious as this, since it does not spare its 

 own species. The flesh, when cut in pieces, resembles raw 

 beef, but when boiled turns pale and tastes like salmon. 

 These fish are taken by hook and line, and in Sicily in 

 nets of very singular arrangement. A kind of labyrinth 

 made of nets is stretched out vertically in the sea, and 

 so constructed as to form a series of chambers, open from 

 the land side by a sort of door, and united by another 

 net, which bars the passage and arrests the fishes in their 



