FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES loi 



none. Mr Turner and Mr Rowland Ward have 

 published books on the subject in this country, the 

 former out of print, the latter brief and a little out 

 of date, though excellent in its day. Mr Spencer 

 Churchill has now recently produced a tasteful 

 volume on the sport. In these books, however, 

 of all the actual history of the great fish, from the 

 egg to the gaff, only the last episode is treated in 

 detail. What follows therefore is offered with 

 some diffidence as the outcome of personal observa- 

 tion and of conversations with others who knew 

 the fish in different seas, not only in Florida but 

 also in the West Indies, where the tarpon is the 

 more precious as a sporting asset by reason of the 

 limited fresh-water resources which that archipelago 

 offers to the fisherman. 



That the tarpon is a kind of herring is evident 

 from an even casual glance at the symmetrical 

 body, deep cleft of the mouth, large round eyes 

 (not, by the way, reproduced with fidelity by the 

 average taxidermist), and blunt, upturned nose. 

 For the most distinctive feature of the larger fish, 

 the whip-like ray of the dorsal fin^ the herrings of 

 cold seas have no equivalent. The use or signifi- 

 cance of this long fin-ray has not, so far as I know, 

 been explained. When I knew the tarpon only in 

 the museum, I used to think ^that this might, as in 

 the dragonet and some other forms, be a secondary 

 sexual character, but as it was present in each and 

 all of the seventy or eighty fish that came under 

 my notice, I conclude (though I confess to having 

 made no examination of their sex) that this is not 

 the case, as they would hardly all have been males. 

 It has been suggested that the ray may serve as a 



