432 
of these banks, to wbich attention has hitherto not been directed, 
is worthy of mention. This is the habit of certain fishes, which 
exist in vast numbers, of frequenting certain areas where they eject 
the broken shells of mollluscs, corals, barnacles and other creatures 
which they have crached, swallowed and cleansed of their soft 
tissues by digestion. . . . Now, in examining critically large quanti- 
ties of material dredged from the bottom I have found that from 
certain areas almost entirely composed of these ejectamenta. In the 
interstices some small creatures hide but the tooth marks of the 
fish were upon nearly every fragment. As for a pint of fragments 
of a given species this bottom-stuff would rarely contain half a 
dozen specimens which had been taken alive by the dredge (most 
frequently the species did not occur at all living in the material 
so dredged), it was obviously impossible that the shells could have 
been captured and afterwards voided on the same spot“. 
F. C. B a k e r says also that fishes often swallow shells 
and carry them away for miles. 
Jeffreys adds, when mentioning some of the shallow water 
shells recorded from great depths, a remark that they may have 
been transported by fish or walrus. He writes thus: 
at Mya truncata^) „Distribution .... 0—1333 fms., at the greatest 
depths valves only from the walrus or cod“; 
at Littorina obtusata '^) (St. 9. 165 fms.): „Dead and probably drifted 
by a curreut or voided by a fish“; 
at Mytilus edulis^)\ „I once obtained a fresh single valve in be- 
tween 70 and 80 fathoms about forty miles off the Shetlands; 
but it had perhaps been voided by a coal-fish {Gadus carbo- 
72arius), which frequents the shore in the spawning season“. 
F. C. Baker: „The geographical distribution of the Mollusca“. Science 
II. New Ser. New York 1895. 
2) Proceedings ZooL Soc. 1881. p. 945. 
Proceedings Zool. Soc. 1883. p. 112, 
J. Gw\ Jeffreys: British Conchology. II. p. 106. 
