frequently. One of the Guiana catfishes, known as Aspredo, very much
resembles her countrywoman the Surinam toad in her nursery
arrangements. Of course you know the Surinam toad--whom not to know
argues yourself unknown--that curious creature that carries her eggs in
little pits on her back, where the young hatch out and pass through
their tadpole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cells
of this living honeycomb only when they have attained the full
amphibian honours of four-legged maturity. Well, Aspredo among cat-fish
manages her brood in much the same fashion; only she carries her eggs
beneath her body instead of on her back like her amphibious rival. When
spawning time approaches, and Aspredo's fancy lightly turns to thoughts
of love, the lower side of her trunk begins to assume, by anticipation,
a soft and spongy texture, honeycombed with pits, between which are
arranged little spiky protuberances. After laying her eggs, the mother
lies flat upon them on the river bottom, and presses them into the
spongy skin, where they remain safely attached until they hatch out and
begin to manage for themselves in life. It is curious that the only two
creatures on earth which have hit out independently this original mode
of providing for their offspring should both be citizens of Guiana,
where the rivers and marshes must probably harbour some special danger
to be thus avoided, not found in equal intensity in other fresh waters.
A prettily marked fish of the Indian Ocean, allied, though not very
closely, to the pipe fishes, has also the distinction of handing over
the young to the care of the mother instead of the father. Its name is
Solenostoma (I regret that no more popular title exists), and it has a
pouch, formed in this case by a pair of long broad fins, within which
the eggs are attached by interlacing threads that push out from the
body. Probably in this instance nutriment is actually provided through
these threads for the use of the embryo, in which case we must regard
the mechanism as very closely analogous indeed to that which obtains
among mammals.
Some few fish, indeed, are truly viviparous; among them certain
blennies and carps, in which the eggs hatch out entirely within the
body of the mother. One of the most interesting of these divergent
types is the common Californian and Mexican silver-fish, an inhabitant
of the bays and inlets of sub-tropical America. Its chief peculiarity
and title to fame lies in the extreme bigness of its young at birth.
The full-grown fish runs to about ten inches in length, fisherman's
scale, while the fry measure as much as three inches apiece; so that
they lie, as Professor Seeley somewhat forcibly expresses it, 'packed
in the body of the parent as close as herrings in a barrel.' This
strange habit of retaining the eggs till after they have hatched out is
not peculiar to fish among egg-laying animals, for the common little
brown English lizard is similarly viviparous, though most of its
relatives elsewhere deposit their eggs to be hatched by the heat of the
sun in earth or sandbanks.
Mr. Hannibal Chollop, if I recollect aright, once shot an imprudent
stranger for remarking in print that the ancient Athenians, that
inferior race, had got ahead in their time of the modern Loco-foco
ticket. But several kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in this
respect of the common reptilian ticket; for instead of leaving about
their eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of themselves, they build
a regular nest, like birds, and sit upon their eggs till the fry emerge
from them. All the sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmed
nest-builders: but here once more it is the male, not the female, who
weaves the materials together and takes care of the eggs during their
period of incubation. The receptacle itself is made of fibres of
water-weeds or stalks of grass, and is open at both ends to let a
current pass through. As soon as the lordly little polygamist has built
it, he coaxes and allures his chosen mates into the entrance, one by
one, to lay their eggs; and then when the nest is full, he mounts guard
over them bravely, fanning them with his fins, and so keeping up a
continual supply of oxygen which is necessary for the proper
development of the embryo within. It takes a month's sitting before the
young hatch out, and even after they appear, this excellent father
(little Turk though he be, and savage warrior for the stocking of his
harem) goes out attended by all his brood whenever he sallies forth for
a morning constitutional in search of caddis-worms, which shows that
there may be more good than we imagine, after all, in the domestic
institutions even of people who don't agree with us.
The bullheads or miller's thumbs, those quaint big-headed beasts which
divide with the sticklebacks the polite attentions of ingenious British
youth, are also nest-builders, and the male fish are said to anxiously
watch and protect their offspring during their undisciplined nonage.
Equally domestic are the habits of those queer shapeless creatures, the
marine lump-suckers, which fasten themselves on to rocks, like limpets,
by their strange sucking disks, and defy all the efforts of enemy or
fishermen to dislodge them by main force from their well-chosen
position. The pretty little tropical walking-fish of the filuroid
tribe--those fish out of water--carry the nest-making instinct a point
further, for they go ashore boldly at the beginning of the rainy season
in their native woods, and scoop out a hole in the beach as a place of
safety, in which they make regular nests of leaves and other
terrestrial materials to hold their eggs. Then father and mother take
turns-about at looking after the hatching, and defend the spawn with
great zeal and courage against all intruders.
I regret to say, however, there are other unprincipled fish which
display their affection and care for their young in far more
questionable and unpleasant manners. For instance, there is that
uncanny creature that inserts its parasitic fry as a tiny egg inside
the unsuspecting shells of mussels and cockles. Our fishermen are only
too well acquainted, again, with one unpleasant marine lamprey, the hag
or borer, so called because it lives parasitically upon other fishes,
whose bodies it enters, and then slowly eats them up from within
outward, till nothing at all is left of them but skin, scales, and
skeleton. They are repulsive eel-shaped creatures, blind, soft, and
slimy; their mouth consists of a hideous rasping sucker; and they pour
out from the glands on their sides a copious mucus, which makes them as
disagreeable to handle as they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel and
cod are the hag's principal victims; but often the fisherman draws up a
hag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of which not a wrack remains
but the hollow shell or bare outer simulacrum. As many as twenty of
these disgusting parasites have sometimes been found within the body of
a single cod-fish.
Yet see how carefully nature provides nevertheless for the due
reproduction of even her most loathsome and revolting creations. The
hag not only lays a small number of comparatively large and well-stored
eggs, but also arranges for their success in life by supplying each
with a bundle of threads at either end, every such thread terminating
at last in a triple hook, like those with which we are so familiar in
the case of adhesive fruits and seeds, like burrs or cleavers. By means
of these barbed processes, the eggs attach themselves to living fishes;
and the young borer, as soon as he emerges from his horny covering,
makes his way at once into the body of his unconscious host, whom he
proceeds by slow degrees to devour alive with relentless industry, from
the intestines outward. This beautiful provision of nature enables the
infant hag to start in life at once in very snug quarters upon a
ready-made fish preserve. I understand, however, that cod-fish
philosophers, actuated by purely personal and selfish conceptions of
utility, refuse to admit the beauty or beneficence of this most
satisfactory arrangement for the borer species.
Probably the best known of all fishes' eggs, however (with the solitary
exception of the sturgeon's, commonly observed between brown bread and
butter, under the name of caviare), are the queer leathery purse-shaped
ova of the sharks, rays, skates, and dog-fishes. Everybody has picked
them up on the seashore, where children know them as devil's purses and
devil's wheelbarrows. Most of these queer eggs are oblong and
quadrangular, with the four corners produced into a sort of handles or
streamers, often ending in long tendrils, and useful for attaching them
to corallines or seaweeds on the bed of the ocean. But it is worth
noticing that in colour the egg-cases closely resemble the common wrack
to which they are oftenest fastened; and as they wave up and down in
the water with the dark mass around them, they must be almost
indistinguishable from the wrack itself by the keenest-sighted of their
enemies. This protective resemblance, coupled with the toughness and
slipperiness of their leathery envelope or egg-shell, renders them
almost perfectly secure from all evil-minded intruders. As a
consequence, the dog-fish lay but very few eggs each season, and those
few, large and well provided with nutriment for their spotted
offspring. It is these purses, and those of the thornback and the
edible skate, that we oftenest pick up on the English coast. The larger
oceanic sharks are mostly viviparous.
In some few cases, indeed, among the shark and ray family, the
mechanism for protection goes a step or two further than in these
simple kinds. That well-known frequenter of Australian harbours, the
Port Jackson shark, lays a pear-shaped egg, with a sort of spiral
staircase of leathery ridges winding round it outside, Chinese pagoda
wise, so that even if you bite it (I speak in the person of a
predaceous fish) it eludes your teeth, and goes dodging off
screw-fashion into the water beyond. There's no getting at this evasive
body anywhere; when you think you have it, it wriggles away sideways,
and refuses to give any hold for jaws or palate. In fact, a more
slippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's unconscious
ingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic chimæra (so called from its very
unprepossessing personal appearance) relies rather upon pure deception
than upon mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell or
case in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a kind of broad
wing on either side, so that it exactly resembles one of the large flat
leaves of the Antarctic fucus in whose midst it lurks. It forms the
high-water mark, I fancy, of protective resemblance amongst eggs, for
not only is the margin leaf-like in shape, but it is even gracefully
waved and fringed with floating hairs, as is the fashion with the
expanded fronds of so many among the gigantic far-southern sea-weeds.
A most curious and interesting set of phenomena are those which often
occur when a group of fishes, once marine, take by practice to
inhabiting freshwater rivers; or, _vice-versâ,_ when a freshwater kind,
moved by an aspiration for more expansive surroundings, takes up its
residence in the sea as a naturalised marine. Whenever such a change of
address happens, it usually follows that the young fry cannot stand the
conditions of the new home to which their ancestors were
unaccustomed--we all know the ingrained conservatism of children--and
so the parents are obliged once a year to undertake a pilgrimage to
their original dwelling-place for the breeding season.
Extreme cases of terrestrial animals, once aquatic in habits, throw a
flood of lurid light (as the newspapers say) upon the reason why this
should be so. For example, frogs and toads develop from tadpoles, which
in all essentials are true gill-breathing fish. It is, therefore,
obvious that they cannot lay their eggs on dry land, where the tadpoles
would be unable to find anything to breathe; so that even the driest
and most tree-haunting toads must needs repair to the water once a year
to deposit their spawn in its native surroundings. Once more, crabs
pass their earlier larval stages as free-swimming crustaceans, somewhat
shrimp-like in appearance, and as agile as fleas: it is only by gradual
metamorphosis that they acquire their legs and claws and heavy
pedestrian habits. Now there are certain kinds of crab, like the West
Indian land-crabs (those dainty morsels whose image every epicure who
has visited the Antilles still enshrines with regret in a warm corner
of his heart), which have taken in adult life to walking bodily on
shore, and visiting the summits of the highest mountains, like the fish
of Deucalion's deluge in Horace. But once a year, as the land-crabs
bask in the sun on St. Catherine's Peak or the Fern Walk, a strange
instinctive longing comes over them automatically to return for a while
to their native element; and, obedient to that inner monitor of their
race, down they march in thousands, _velut agmine facto_, to lay their
eggs at their leisure in Port Royal harbour. On the way, the negroes
catch them, all full of rich coral, waiting to be spawned; and Chloe or
Dinah, serves them up hot, with breadcrumbs, in their own red shells,
neatly nestling between the folds of a nice white napkin. The rest run
away, and deposit their eggs in the sea, where the young hatch out, and
pass their larval stage once more as free and active little swimming
crustaceans.
Well, crabs, I need hardly explain in this age of enlightenment, are
not fish; but their actions help to throw a side-light on the migratory
instinct in salmon, eels, and so many other true fish which have
changed with time their aboriginal habits. The salmon himself, for
instance, is by descent a trout, and in the parr stage he is even now
almost indistinguishable from many kinds of river-trout that never
migrate seaward at all. But at some remote period, the ancestors of the
true salmon took to going down to the great deep in search of food, and
being large and active fish, found much more to eat in the salt water
than ever they had discovered in their native streams. So they settled
permanently in their new home, as far as their own lives went at least;
though they found the tender young could not stand the brine that did
no harm to the tougher constitutions of the elders. No doubt the change
was made gradually, a bit at a time, through the brackish water, the
species getting further and further seaward down bays and estuaries
with successive generations, but always returning to spawn in its
native river, as all well-behaved salmon do to the present moment. At
last, the habit hardened into an organic instinct, and nowadays the
young salmon hatch out like their fathers as parr in fresh water, then
go to the sea in the grilse stage and grow enormously, and finally
return as full-grown salmon to spawn and breed in their particular
birthplace.
Exactly the opposite fate has happened to the eels. The salmonoids as a
family are freshwater fish, and by far the greater number of
kinds--trout, char, whitefish, grayling, pollan, vendace, gwyniad, and
so forth--are inhabitants of lakes, steams, ponds, and rivers, only a
very small number having taken permanently or temporarily to a marine
residence. But the eels, as a family, are a saltwater group, most of
their allies, like the congers and murænas, being exclusively confined
to the sea, and only a very small number of aberrant types having ever
taken to invading inland waters. If the life-history of the salmon,
however, has given rise to as much controversy as the Mar peerage, the
life-history of the eel is a complete mystery. To begin with, nobody
has ever so much as distinguished between male and female eels; except
microscopically, eels have never been seen in the act of spawning, nor
observed anywhere with mature eggs. The ova themselves are wholly
unknown: the mode of their production is a dead secret. All we know is
this: that eels never reproduce in fresh water; that a certain number
of adults descend the rivers to the sea, irregularly, during the winter
months; and that some of these must presumably spawn with the utmost
circumspection in brackish water or in the deep sea, for in the course
of the summer myriads of young eels, commonly called grigs, and
proverbial for their merriment, ascend the rivers in enormous bodies,
and enter every smaller or larger tributary.
If we know little about the paternity and maternity of eels, we know a
great deal about their childhood and youth, or, to speak more eelishly,
their grigginess and elverhood. The young grigs, when they do make
their appearance, leave us in no doubt at all about their presence or
their reality. They wriggle up weirs, walls, and floodgates; they force
there way bodily through chinks and apertures; they find out every
drain, pipe, or conduit in a given plane rectilinear figure; and when
all other spots have been fully occupied, they take to dry land, like
veritable snakes, and cut straight across country for the nearest lake,
pond, or ornamental waters.
These swarms or migrations are known to farmers as eel-fairs; but the
word ought more properly to be written eel-fares, as the eels then fare
or travel up the streams to their permanent quarters. A great many
eels, however, never migrate seaward at all, and never seem to attain
to years of sexual maturity. They merely bury themselves under stones
in winter, and live and die as celibates in their inland retreats. So
very terrestrial do they become, indeed, that eels have been taken with
rats or field-mice undigested in their stomachs.
The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish, originally (like
the salmon) of freshwater habits, but now partially marine, which
ascends its parent stream for spawning during the summer season.
Incredible quantities are caught for caviare in the great Russian
rivers. At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people collect in
spring for the fishery, and work by relays, day and night continuously,
as long as the sturgeons are going up stream. On some of the
tributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, the
sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so
that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I
take this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights,' as the scoffer
might imagine, but from that most respectable authority, Professor
Seeley.) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is no
danger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish
lays from two to three million eggs, each of which, as caviare eaters
well know, is quite big enough to be distinctly seen with the naked eye
in the finished product. The best caviare is simply bottled exactly as
found, with the addition merely of a little salt. No man of taste can
pretend to like the nasty sun-dried sort, in which the individual eggs
are reduced to a kind of black pulp, and pressed hard with the feet
into doubtful barrels.
In conclusion, let me add one word of warning as to certain popular
errors about the young fry of sundry well-known species. Nothing is
more common than to hear it asserted that sprats are only immature
herring. This is a complete mistake. Believe it not. Sprats are a very
distinct species of the herring genus, and they never grow much bigger
than when they appear, _brochés_, at table. The largest adult sprat
measures only six inches, while full-grown herring may attain as much
as fifteen. Moreover, herring have teeth on the palate, always wanting
in sprats, by which means the species may be readily distinguished at
all ages. When in doubt, therefore, do not play trumps, but examine the
palate. On the other hand, whitebait, long supposed to be a distinct
species, has now been proved by Dr. Günther, the greatest of
ichthyologists, to consist chiefly of the fry or young of herring. To
complete our discomfiture, the same eminent authority has also shown
that the pilchard and the sardine, which we thought so unlike, are one
and the same fish, called by different names according as he is caught
off the Cornish coast or in Breton, Portuguese, or Mediterranean
waters. Such aliases are by no means uncommon among his class. To say
the plain truth, fish are the most variable and ill-defined of animals;
they differ so much in different habitats, so many hybrids occur
between them, and varieties merge so readily by imperceptible stages
into one another, that only an expert can decide in doubtful cases--and
every expert carefully reverses the last man's opinion. Let us at least
be thankful that whitebait by any other name would eat as nice; that
science has not a single whisper to breathe against their connection
with lemon; and that whether they are really the young of _Clupea
harengus_ or not, the supply at Billingsgate shows no symptom of
falling short of the demand.
AN ENGLISH SHIRE.
For the reasons which have determined the existence of Sussex as a
county of England, and which have given it the exact boundaries that it
now possesses, we must go back to the remote geological history of the
secondary ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire
were predetermined for it by the shape and consistence of the mud or
sand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filled
up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it
sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon
principality of Ælle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of
Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological
conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see
only the handicraft and interaction of human beings--Euskarian and
Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman--a closer scrutiny of
history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements--chalk and
clay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and
forest-clad plain. The value and importance of these underlying facts
in the comprehension of history has, I believe, been very generally
overlooked; and I propose accordingly here to take the single county of
Sussex in detail, in order to show that when the geological and
geographical factors of the problem are given, all the rest follows as
a matter of course. By such detailed treatment alone can one hope to
establish the truth of the general principle that human history is at
bottom a result of geographical conditions, acting upon the
fundamentally identical constitution of man.
In a certain sense, it is quite clear that human life depends mainly
upon soil and conformation, to an extent that nobody denies. You cannot
have a dense population in Sahara; and you can hardly fail to have one
in the fruitful valley of the Nile. The growth of towns in one district
rather than another must be governed largely by the existence of rivers
or harbours, of coal or metals, of agricultural lowlands or defensible
heights. Glasgow could not spring up in inland Leicestershire, nor
Manchester in coalless Norfolk. Insular England must naturally be the
greatest shipping country in Europe; while no large foreign trade is
possible in any Bohemia except Shakespeare's. So much everybody admits.
But it seems to me that these underlying causes have coloured the
entire local history of every district to an extent which few people
adequately recognise, and that until such recognition becomes more
general, our views of history must necessarily be very narrow. We must
see not only that something depends upon geographical configuration,
not even merely that a great deal depends upon it, but that everything
depends upon it. We must unlearn our purely human history, and learn a
history of interaction between nature and man instead.