550 
THE OCEAN WORLD. 
products of the fishery are thus prepared. More than half the pro- 
duce of the French fleet are sent to France merely salted, by ships 
which carry salt, bringing back fish in return to Rochelle, Bordeaux, 
and Cette, where the process of curing is completed. In our home 
fisheries, to abbreviate slightly Dr. Bertram’s account, the greater 
part of the cod taken are eaten fresh, hut considerable quantities of 
the cod and ling taken on the coast are sent to market cured. The 
process pursued is very simple : they are brought on shore quite fresh, 
and are at once split from head to tail, and by copious washings 
thoroughly cleansed from all particles of blood ; a piece of the back- 
bone is cut away ; they are drained, and afterwards laid down in long 
vats, where they are covered with salt, and kept under heavy weights. 
By-and-by the fish are taken out of the vats ; they are once more 
drained, and carefully blushed, to remove any impurity, and bleached 
by being spread out singly on the sandy beach, or on the rocks ; when 
thoroughly bleached, they are collected into heaps technically called 
steeples, and when the bloom, or whitish appearance, comes out on the 
fish, they are ready for the market. 
The cod is one of our best-known fishes, and was at one time much 
more plentiful and cheap. It is a deep-water fish, found in all 
northern seas, and in the Atlantic, but never in the Mediterranean. 
It is extremely voracious, greedily eating up the smaller denizens of 
the ocean. It grows to a large size, and is very prolific, as most fishes 
are. A cod-roe has been found more than once to be half the gross 
weight of the fish, and specimens of the female cod have been caught 
with upwards of eight millions of eggs. The fish spawn in mid- 
winter : but here our information ceases ; when it becomes reproductive 
is unknown. Dr. Bertram thinks that it is at least three years old 
before it is endowed with breeding power. 
The growth of the cod is supposed to be very slow ; Dr. Bertram 
quotes the authority of a rather learned fisherman of Buckie, who had 
seen a cod which had got enclosed in a large rock pool, and he found 
that it did not grow at a greater rate than eight to twelve ounces per 
annum, though it had abundance of food. 
On our own coast two modes of fishing are in common use : one by 
deep sea lines, on each of which hooks are fastened at distances twelve 
feet apart by means of short lines six feet long, called on the Cornish 
coast “ snoods.” Buoys, ropes, or grapnels, are fixed to each end of the 
