CHAP. IX.] THE TOUETH DAT. 213 



conclude, that, contrary to the pike or luce, all carps are the 

 better for age and bigness. The tongues of carps are noted 

 to be choice and costly meat, especially to them that buy 

 them: but Gresner says, carps have no tongue like other 

 fish, but a piece of flesh-like fish in their mouth like to a 

 tongue, and should be called a palate : but it is certain it is 

 choicely good, and that the carp is to be reckoned amongst 

 those leather-mouthed fish, which I told you have their teeth 

 in their throat ; and for that reason he is very seldom lost by 

 breaking his hold, if your hook be once stuck into his chaps. 

 I told you that Sir Francis Bacon thinks that the carp 

 lives but ten years ; but "Janus Dubravius has writ a book 

 "Of Fish and Fish-ponds," 1 in which he says, that carps 

 begin to spawn at the age of three years, and continue to do 

 so till thirty : he says also, that in the time of their breeding, 

 which is in summer, when the sun hath warmed both the 

 earth and water, and so apted them also for generation, that 

 then three or four male carps will follow a female ; and that 

 then she putting on a seeming coyness, they force her 

 through weeds and flags, where she lets fall her eggs or 

 spawn, which sticks fast to the weeds, and then they let fall 

 their melt upon it, and so it becomes in a short time to be a 

 living fish : and, as I told you, it is thought the carp does 

 this several months in the year ; and most believe that 

 most fish breed after this manner, except the eel. And it 

 has been observed, that when the spawner has weakened 

 herself by doing that natural office, that two or three melters 

 have helped her from off the weeds by bearing her up on 

 both sides, and guarding her into the deep. And you may 

 note, that though this may seem a curiosity not worth 

 observing, yet others have judged it worth their time and 



destroyed during the French Revolution." In 1830 Sir James found carp 

 in the ponds at Versailles, which had been placed there in 1690, and were 

 white with age. Sir John Hawkins says, that in one of the daily papers 

 for the month of August, 1782, an article appeared, purporting, that in 

 the basin at Emanuel College, Cambridge, a carp was then living that 

 had been in that water thirty-six years ; which, though it had lost one 

 eye, knew, and would constantly approach, its feeder. Carp are certainly 

 a long-lived fish. Those in the long canal in Hampton Court Park, are 

 supposed to have been there since the canal was made by William the 

 Third. ED. 



1 Vide ante, page 193. 



