18 SHAD. 



fry of a fish we never see ! Besides, may we not reasonably 

 enough conclude that if the fry be so very fine, the fuU-grown 

 fish will be even more palatable ? It i§ curious that while there 

 are thousands of whitebait in the Firth of Forth; and equally 

 curious that they are caught chiefly on the sprat-ground there, 

 no Edinburgh fishmonger, nor any of the Scottish fishermen, 

 ever saw specimens of these fish with milt or roe in them. Nor 

 did any of these persons ever see a whitebait bigger than the 

 usual size, that is, ranging in length from one to about three 

 inches. After they attain that size they become either sprats 

 or herrings. 



If what some naturalists have published in regard to its 

 habits be true, the shad must be a very interesting fish. It has 

 been hinted that it ascends from the sea to deposit its spawn in 

 the rivers, being something like the salmon in that respect. In 

 this phase of its life it is the opposite of the eel, which lives in 

 fresh but spawns in salt water. What salmon do, shad can 

 doubtless also accomplish, although it will go a long way to dis- 

 prove what has been said by naturalists, if the shad should be 

 proved not to be the parent of the whitebait, or rather, if it can 

 be proved that whitebait are the young of some other fish. 

 In the days when the herring was thought to be an animal of 

 migratory habits, rushing continually from our own firths and 

 bays to the icy polar seas, some of the giants of the tribe were 

 poetically described as swimming in the van of the mighty heer, 

 acting as the guides and leaders of the smaller fish. These 

 giants were Thwaite shads ; but as it is now well known that 

 the herring is local in its habits, and not migratory in the sense 

 of taking long journeys, the shad must therefore be deposed 

 from that leadership ; nor can it be even allowed the merit of 

 being a tolerable table-fish, it is a coarse, insipid fish, and alto- 

 gether destitute of the delightful flavour of the common herring. 



What is whitebait if it be not the young of the shad ? Is 

 it, then, a distinct species 1 It would be easy enough to befool 

 the public with an absurd answer as to what whitebait is, 

 because no writer, not the ubiquitous Buckland himself, can, 

 successfully contradict another on almost any point of fish- 

 growth. When we see the transformation of the tadpole into 

 a frog, and the zoea into a crab, we need not be surprised at its 

 having been once prophesied that the whitebait turned a bleak, 

 or the assertion that it undoubtedly grows into a herring (clupea 

 hca-genus) ; and if pressed for our reasons, we have a better 



