THE BLEAK. 
195 
The Bleak is very common in many of our rivers, and 
keep together in large shoals. These fish seem at certain 
seasons to be in great agonies ; they tumble about near the 
surface of the water, and are incapable of swimming f ar 
from the place, but in about two hours recover, and dis- 
appear. Fish thus affected, the Thames fishermen call mad 
bleaks. They seem to be troubled with a species of gor- 
dius or hair-worm, of the same kind with those which 
Aristotle says that the ballerus and lillo are infested with 
which torments them, so that they rise to the surface of the 
water, and then die. 
Artificial pearls are made with the scales of this fish, and 
we think of the dace. They arc beaten into a line powder, 
then diluted with water, and introduced into a thin glass 
bubble, which is afterwards filled with wax. The French 
were the inventors of this art. Dr. Lister tells us, that 
when he was at Paris, a certain artist used in one winter 
thirty hampers full of fish in this manufacture. 
The bleak seldom exceeds five or six inches in length ; 
their body is slender, greatly compressed sideways, not un- 
like that of the sprat. 
The eyes are large ; the irides of a pale yellow ; the un- 
der jaw "the largest ; the lateral line crooked ; the gills sil- 
very ; the back green ; the sides and belly silvery ; the fins 
pellucid; the scales fall off very easily; the tail much 
forked. 
During the month of July there appear in the Thames, near 
Blackwall and Greenwich, innumerable multitudes of small 
fish, which are known to the Londoners by the name of 
White Bait. 1 hey are esteemed very delicious when fried 
with line flour, and occasion, during the season, a vast re- 
sort of the lower order of epicures to the taverns conti- 
guous to the places they are taken at. 
There are various conjectures about this species, but all 
terminate in a suppositi-on, that they are the fry of some 
fish, but few agree to which kind they owe their origin. 
Some attribute it to the shad, others to the sprat, the smelt, 
and the bleak. That they neither belong to the shad, nor 
l he sprat, is evident from the number of branchiostegous 
fays, which in those are eight, in this only three. That 
they arc not the young of the smelts is as clear, because 
they want the pinna adiposa , or rayless fin ; and that they 
ure not the offspring of the bleak is extremely probable, 
since we never heard of the white bait being found in any 
other river, notwithstanding the bleak is very common in 
several of the British streams: but as the white bait bears 
