GENERAL FACTS ABOUT SEA FISH 43 



quoted as illustrating this stationary habit in a group already 

 sufficiently dispersed in the egg. But on the one hand we 

 have the wandering cods {Gadus), which also begin life in 

 floating eggs, and on the other we have the bull-heads ( Cottus), 

 gobies {Gobius), and suckers {^Liparis) — interesting small forms 

 to which a subsequent chapter is devoted — which, although 

 hatched from heavy eggs, are litde, if any, more endowed with 

 the migratory instinct than the flat-fish themselves. Not only 

 does the floating egg tend to spread over a greater area during 

 the interval which elapses before hatching, but it may also 

 escape certain dangers, such as possibly the trawl, and cer- 

 tainly spawn-eating fishes, like the cod and haddock. It 

 might, therefore, have been thought that Nature would have 

 provided against such extra risks by producing a greater 

 supply, and that the herring would deposit more eggs than 

 another fish of like size, say the whiting, the spawn of which 

 floats in the sea. But Nature knows her own business best, 

 and we find that whereas the number of eggs in an average 

 herring would not exceed thirty thousand, those in a good- 

 sized female whiting may easily reach ten times that number, 

 or three hundred thousand. In support of Nature's view, 

 moreover, it must be borne in mind that even the floating 

 eggs run some risks to which those which develop at the 

 bottom are not subjected. They may, for instance, be thrown 

 ashore or otherwise destroyed by storms, and they may also be 

 consumed, along with other food, by all manner of surface- 

 feeding fishes, particularly those, like the herring {Cluped) and 

 basking shark {Selache), provided with straining giU-rakers, 

 which allow nothing, however small, to escape. On the whole, 

 however, their very independence one of the other (save in a 

 few cases like that aforementioned of the angler-fish) must in 

 a measure secure their safety, on the same principle as that 

 which governs the forming of open order in battle. Facts, 

 too, are better than theories. So long as we find the herring, 

 with its poor little achievement of only thirty or forty 



