aADEANS AND PLEURONECTS. 355 



Isle; the men of Wexford make a good thing of the 

 banks which lie off their county ; Galway Bay is called 

 also 'the Bay of Hakes;' and Waterford, scarcely be- 

 hind Wexford, has been known to yield one thousand 

 line fish to six men in a night. 



Hake is frequently borne in heraldry, in allusion to 

 the name : ' Sable seme of cross crosslets fitchy, three 

 hakes hauriant argent/ are the arms of the family of 

 Hacket of Newtown, Isle of Wight. The Hakeheds 

 of Ireland adopt the same fish ; the Hacket and Doxay 

 families in Ireland, and the Devonshire Hakes, quarter 

 their namesakes hauriant, on arms azure, vert, and or. 

 We pass now from the cod, to the 



Pleuronects, or Flat Fish. 



Brill and soles are nutritious and agreeable, and the same may 

 be said of turbot.* 



Fish with flat bodies are of two kinds, one (like skate) 

 flattened downwards or vertically, the other (which in- 

 cludes turbots, plaice, soles, and flounders) compressed 

 from side to side, except the head, which is distorted as 

 well as flattened. AU the species belonging to this di- 

 vision are styled pleuronects, or side-swimmers, as they 

 ordinarily move through the water on one of their flat 

 sides.f The tribe consists of many individuals, unequally 

 distributed in different parts of the globe, and in greater 



* '^ryrra, /SovyXoitrtroy, evTpo<f)oi Koi. ijfielai, tovtois 8e dvoKoye'i 6 

 pSfi^os. — Athen. 



t The coloured surface of a sole is not the back, nor the white 

 one underneath the belly ; but the upper and under sides. The 

 absence of colour on the last is an effect of etiolation, or depriva- 

 tion of the sun's rays ; the fish indeed when scared exposes this 

 surface to the light, but too momentarily to be affected by it. The 

 upper side assimilates so perfectly with its gite on the sand, that 

 the eye frequently requires the end of the barbed fish-spear to 

 determine on which of the two it is resting. 



