1906| Tue EccGs oF THE FRESH-WATER LING. 221 
found in Scottish or Irish waters. From New England and the 
basin of the St. John River, New Brunswick, it extends through 
the Great Lakes and more northern waters to the Manitoba and 
Athabaska lakes and rivers, while specimens have been procured 
in the Okanagan and Columbia river regions in British Columbia. 
Drs. Jordan and Evermann speak of it as abundant in the north 
as far as Bering Straits and the Arctic Seas, but rare in the Ohio 
and Upper Mississippi. A number of specimens are preserved in 
the Ottawa Fisheries Museum, some being local, e.g., Lake des 
Chene, Ragged Lake, Algonquin Park, Healy’s Falls, and Rock 
Lake, Haliburton Co., Ont., and one specimen sent from Swan 
River, near Vernon, B.C. Asa rule it is regarded as a pest, and 
fishermen are of opinion that it is a great destroyer of the spawn 
and young of valuable fishes; but ‘its feeding habits require accu- 
rate investigation 
As the cod and most of the Gadide, so far as known, produce 
eggs, which, as Dr. A. S. Packard states, ‘‘rise to the surface of 
the water, on which they float,” it has long interested naturalists 
to know of what character are the eggs of the burbot, the only 
fresh-water member of the family. If, as seems practically cer- 
tain, the burbot is a species of the cod family which has changed 
its habits and become a non-marine form, it was highly interest- 
ing to ascertain whether its eggs retained the characteristics of 
its ocean-inhabiting relations or not. Fish authorities and embry- 
ologists have long been on the look out for the eggs of the burbot 
for that reason. The minute delicate glassy transparent globes, 
floating lightly, like invisible soap-bubbles near the sea’s surface, 
are called pelagic or buoyant eggs; and the eggs of the cod, had- 
dock, pollock, whiting, hake, marine ling, and other Gadid@, are 
typically pelagic. Could it be that a species of that family, per- 
manently resorting to fresh water, would have retained that inter- 
esting type of egg, or has the character of the egg changed with 
the change of the habitat of the fish ? 
Thirty years ago a Belgian investigator, Dr. C. Van Bambeke, 
described the egg of the fresh-water ling, inhabiting rivers and 
lakes in Europe,* but he never secured them after being deposited 
* Mém. Couronn. l’Acad. Roy. de Belgique, tome XL. 1876. 
