3 12 
AMERICAN FISHES. 
At the meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, in 1852, Dr. 
W. O. Ayres stated that he had seen a block of wood, a cubic foot in 
dimension, taken from the stomach of a Halibut, where it had apparently 
lain for a long time. Capt. George A. Johnson found an accordion key 
in one of them. Olafson, in 1831, studying them on the coast of Green¬ 
land, found not only pieces of iron and wood in them, but in the stomach 
of one individual a large piece of floe ice. Capt. Collins has observed 
that they often kill their prey by blows of the tail, a fact which is quite 
novel and interesting. He described to me an instance which occurred 
on a voyage home from Sable Island in 1877 : “ The man at the wheel 
sang out that he saw a Halibut flapping its tail about a quarter of a mile 
off our starboard quarter. I looked through the spy-glass, and his state¬ 
ment was soon verified by the second appearance of the tail. We hove 
out a dory, and two men went in 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 his 
enemy had been captured. 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 Halibut, in its turn, is the prey of seals, of the white whale, and of 
the various large sharks, especially the ground shark, or sleeping shark, in 
the stomachs of which they have sometimes been found ; their sides, I am 
told by Copt. Collins, are often deeply scarred, probably by the teeth of 
the sharks, or in their early lives by mouths of larger individuals of their 
own kind. 
There is diversity of opinion regarding their spawning. Some fishermen 
say that they breed at Christmas time, in the month of January, when 
they are on the shoals. Others declare that it is in summer, at the end 
of June. Capt. George A. Johnson, of the Schooner “Augusta H. John¬ 
son,” of Gloucester, assures me that Halibut “ spawn, just like the human 
race, at any time of the year.” In April, 1878, he was fishing on Quer- 
eau Bank, and found large and small Halibut, the large ones full of spawn. 
In May he was on the Le Have Bank, where he found only small male fish 
full of milt ; in June he was on Le Have again, fishing in shallow water, 
where he found plenty of “small bull fish, with their pockets full of milt”; in 
