74 
MONKFISH. 
only be explained by its being more select in its appetite for 
food. One which measured four feet six inches in length, had 
ill its stomach twenty-eight opercula, or head-covers of whelks, 
without the shells, which latter had been thrown up from the 
stomach, as the Sharks and Skates are known to do with 
whatever indigestible materials they occasionally swallow. And 
besides these remains of what appears to have been a favourite 
food, there were also fragments of small fishes, and two stones 
about the size of nutmegs, which probably had been taken 
in consequence of having been covered with some sorts of 
encrusting corals, and would have also been thrown up from 
the stomach in their turn. 
Oppian says that it produces young twice in the year, by 
which he may be understood to mean no more than that some 
of them are found in a fertile condition at opposite seasons. 
I have found the eggs as large as walnuts in May, and the 
young, usually to about twenty, to be expelled all at once in 
July, on the instant when the pregnant fish was taken into 
the boat. Risso mentions the same thing, and ascribes the 
sudden parturition to faintness produced by the cessation of 
the action of the gills, but more probably it proceeds from the 
alarm of capture. These young ones are about a foot in 
length, and closely resemble the parent fish, even to the 
roughness of the skin and spines, with teeth also in the jaws. 
The ancients believed that this fish had an affection for its 
young similar to that displayed by the Blue Shark and some 
others of that race; according to a maxim which they regarded 
as universal, that it was the property of every creature which 
produces its young alive, to manifest love for their preserva- 
tion. In the present instance, in the prospect of danger they 
supposed it shewn by affording them shelter in the depression 
between the head and pectoral fins. 
The skin of this fish was anciently of much use in the arts, 
being of that particular degree of roughness which fitted it 
for polishing ivory and wood; on which account the fish was 
called by the Greeks Rhine, or the file. 
It is disregarded as food in the present day, but in ancient 
times it was otherwise. Paulus jEgineta, a physician of Greece, 
speaking of cartilaginous fishes, says; — “The Torpedo and 
Firefiair have soft and sweet flesh, which is easily digested; 
