Suborder Heterosomata 491 
soon verified by the second appearance of the tail. We hove 
out a dory, and two men went with her, taking with them a 
pair of gaff-hooks. They soon returned, bringing not only the 
halibut, which was a fine one of about seventy pounds weight, 
but a small codfish which it had been trying to kill by striking 
it with its tail. The codfish was quite exhausted by the repeated 
blows and did not attempt to escape after its enemy had been cap- 
tured. The halibut was so completely engaged in the pursuit 
of the codfish that it paid no attention to the dory and was 
easily captured.’ 
“The females become heavy with roe near the middle of the 
year, and about July and August are ready to spawn, although 
‘some fishermen say that they spawn at Christmas’ or ‘in the 
month of January, when they are on the shoals.’ The roe of 
a large halibut which weighed 356 pounds weighed 44 pounds, 
and indeed the ‘ovaries of a large fish are too heavy to be lifted 
by a man without considerable exertion, being often 2 feet or 
more in length.’ A portion of the roe ‘representing a fair 
average of the eggs, was weighed and found to contain 2185 
eggs,’ and the entire number would be 2,182,773.” 
Closely allied to the halibut are numerous smaller forms 
with more elongate body. The Greenland halibut, Retuhardtius 
hippoglossoides, and the closely related species in Japan, 
Reinhardtius matsuure, differ from the halibut most obviously 
in the straight lateral line. The arrow-toothed halibut, 
Atheresthes stomias, lives in deeper waters in the North Pacific. 
Its flesh is soft, the mouth very large, armed with arrow-shaped 
teeth. The head in this species is less distorted than in any 
of the others, the upper eye being on the edge of the disk in 
front of the dorsal fin. For this reason it has been supposed 
to be the most primitive of the living species, but these traits 
are doubtless elusive and a result of degeneration. 
Eopsetta jordani is a smaller halibut-like fish, common on 
the coast of California, an excellent food-fish, with firm white 
flesh, sold in San Francisco restaurants under the very erroneous 
name of “‘English sole.” Large numbers are dried by the 
Chinese for export to China. A similar species, Hippoglossoides 
platessoides, known as the ‘“‘sand-dab,” is common on both 
shores of the North Atlantic, and several related species are 
