The Purple Veil 



337 



In China, Japan seeks no unfair ad- 

 vantage. She asks no favor from China 

 that is not granted to England or the 

 United States or to the entire world. 

 With England and the United States she 

 stands for the open door and, in the 

 words of your great President, "square 

 deal." 



Under these conditions Japan is will- 

 ing to take her chances in the rivalry 

 of trade. We believe in the survival 



of the fittest in trade as well as in social 

 development. If, in a fair field, we 

 cannot hold our own position we shall 

 be crowded out of the race, and it is 

 right we should be. But we know that 

 the trade of China is large enough for 

 us all ; that we can all share in it to our 

 profit as well as to that of China, and 

 instead of building on the ruins of a 

 rival, we can build side by side for 

 mutual advantage. 



THE PURPLE VEIL 



A Romance of the Sea 



OFF the New England coast a 

 curious object is often found 

 floating on the water, some- 

 what resembling a lady's veil of gigantic 

 size and of a violet or purple color. 

 The fishermen allude to it generally as 

 the ' ' purple veil, ' ' and many have been 

 the speculations concerning its nature 

 and origin. In 1871 the late Prof. 

 Spencer F. Baird had the opportunity 

 of examining one of these objects at 

 sea, and he found it to present the ap- 

 pearance "of a continuous sheet of a 

 purplish-brown color, 20 or 30 feet in 

 length and 4 or 5 feet in width, com- 

 posed of a mucous substance, which was 

 perfectly transparent, to which, as a 

 whole, a purple color was imparted by 

 the presence of specks distributed uni- 

 formly throughout the mass to the num- 

 ber of about thirty or more to the square 

 inch." 



On examining the substance with a 

 magnifying glass it was found that each 

 little speck consisted of an embryonic 

 fish, moving vigorously within the nar- 

 row limits of a little cell in the jelly- 

 like mass, so that it was obvious that 

 the purple veil, as a whole, was the 

 egg-mass of a fish. 



It is somewhat startling to be told, by 

 so good an authority as Dr Theodore 



Gill, that the purple veil is the product 

 of a single fish, and not so very large a 

 fish either, as it rarely exceeds 3 feet in 

 length, and that as many as 1,000,000* 

 eggs may be contained in a single egg- 

 mass. By allowing the eggs to develop 

 under observation, Alexander Agassiz 

 succeeded in identifying the parent fish 

 as the Lophins piscatorius — variously 

 known as the " Goose-fish," the "All- 

 mouth," or the "Angler," one of the 

 most remarkable fishes in existence. 



It derived its name of ' ' Goose-fish ' ' 

 from its ' ' having been known to swal- 

 low live geese," a statement almost 

 incredible ; but a reputable fisherman 

 told the late G. Brown Goode that 

 ' ' he once saw a struggle in the water, 

 and found that a Goose- fish had swal- 

 lowed the head and neck of a large 

 loon, which had pulled it to the surface 



Fig. i. — Three eggs embedded in the gelat- 

 inous membrane in which they are laid; mag- 

 nified. (After A. Agassiz. ) 



