Francisco, collided with a whale about four miles north of Point Bonita, and the collision nearly wrecked her. She was obliged to return to port for repairs. The impresison on board was that the vessel had struck a rock. The steamship Petersburg, of the Russian volunteer fleet, when near Minicoy, in the South Indian Ocean, experienced a sharp shock and stopped as though gripped in a vise. The sea was found to be colored with the lifeblood of two huge whales, which lay floating in their last agony. One was cut through by the steamer's sharp stem, and the other killed by repeated blows of the screw propeller. The German steamship Waesland, bound from Antwerp to New York, ran into and killed a sleeping whale. A smaller steamer, the Kalloe, collided with a whale near Seaham Harbor, and wounded it badly. In 1889, the James Turpie, a Shields steamship, nearly cut a whale in two one starlight night. The schooner O. M. Marrett was almost wrecked by passing whales in the North Atlantic. Many of the school struck her repeatedly with great violence. In 1890, the Ocean Spray, a small sailing vessel, bound to England from Galveston, struck a sleeping whale and received considerable damage. In 1891, Her Majesty's ship Immortalite was stopped short, though going at 12 knots per hour, by cutting deeply into a whale, and it was necessary to go astern in order to get rid of the incumbrance.

The brigantine Handa Isler, of 260 tons register and laden with 1,000,000 feet of timber, bound from Mercury Bay, New Zealand, for Sydney, was struck amidships by a whale head-on, and badly damaged, leaking thereafter at the rate of one foot an hour. She was 220 miles distant from Sydney, and the deck cargo had to be jettisoned before she reached port. The sealing schooner Mermaid, from Victoria, B. C., had an unusual experience off the coast of Japan, being attacked by a whale which the vessel had awakened from its sleep. The animal made for the schooner, which avoided collision by steering to one side. But the irritated whale then made for her head-on and landed a heavy blow with its tail against the stem, breaking it and carrying off the forward rigging. The whale evidently hurt himself, as he sank immediately. The

schooner reached a Japanese port and was repaired. The steamship Port Adelaide had the peculiar experience of being raced with by a whale which appeared close alongside one morning and followed the vessel for four days, never more than seventy yards away, and generally close astern. It retired from the contest only after traveling 980 statute miles, certainly without resting and apparently without food.

The most wonderful experience with whales a ship probably ever had, was that of the British steamship Dewsland, in latitude 41° 15', longitude 27° 20', while bound from Bilbao to Philadelphia, deep laden with Spanish iron ore, a few years ago. A terrific storm, driving before it a huge sea like a tidal wave struck her, and she became unmanageable in a cross sea. The breakers subsided as she approached an object on the water which proved to be an immense dead whale, covered with countless birds, and with a stream of sperm oil oozing out upon the sea in all directions from the fatty derelict.

SEAL FISHERIES.

The Pribyloff Islands, off Alaska, contribute more than three times as many seals to the industry as any other sealing locality in the world. The southern seas, however, are also resorts of the seals They are found near the Lobos Islands, on the eastern coast of South America, at the South Shetland Islands, the Straits of Magellan, the Falkland Islands, the Cape of Good Hope and the Japanese Islands. Seals belong to the mammalian family, and live much on shore, on sandy beaches, rocks, or ice floes, where they breed and bask in the sun. There are two species of seals known to commerce, the eared seal, which furnishes the beautiful fur so much admired by women, and the earless, or hair seals, whose skin is valuable only as leather, and whose oil is also a useful commodity. The principal hair-seal fisheries are those of Newfoundland, Labrador and Nova Zembla. The seals resort in vast numbers to the ice fields that float past these shores, for the purpose of bringing forth their young. The little seals weigh at their birth about five pounds;

but they grow rapidly, and when they are three or four weeks old they are in their best condition for being killed. The sea-hunters leap from their vessels to the ice, armed with a pole, tipped with iron, with which they deal a fatal blow to the young seal. By means of a scalping knife the skin, with the fat adhering, three or four inches thick, is quickly stripped from the carcass and rolled into a bundle for the ship. When the ship reaches port the skins are separated from the fat, salted and sent to English tanneries, where they are converted into leather. The fur seals which are found about the Pribyloff Islands have a thick, soft, velvety fur underneath the long loose exterior hair, and it is this under fur which makes the elegant garments worn by women. The value of these skins in the raw state varies from $5 to $25 apiece. Most of the skins are taken to London and there dressed.

PEARL FISHERIES.

The cause of the pearl is the introduction of a grain of sand or other foreign substance into the shell of the pearl oyster. This causes an irritation of the delicate tissues of the oyster, which immediately deposits the pearly matter around it for protection. Advantage of this fact has been taken to put substances within the shells of young oysters to induce the formation of pearls, and the Chinese by this method force a species of fresh water mussels to produce the jewel. The most important pearl fisheries of the world are those of Ceylon and Coromandel, in the Indian Sea, whence pearls have been obtained since the earliest times of history. The divers are natives, trained to the pursuit, who are accustomed to descend to the depth of six or eight fathoms some forty times a day, and remain under water from a minute to a minute and a half. The fishing season begins in March or April, and lasts but one month. A single shell may contain from eight to twenty pearls, varying in size from that of a small pea to about three times that size. The coasts of Java, Sumatra, Japan, and also Colombia and other points on the shores of South America, have yielded large quantities of pearls; but they are usually smaller than the Oriental pearls, and inferior to them in lustre.

FECUNDITY OF FISH.

Piscatory authorities of the highest standard tell us that were it not for nature's grand "evening up" provisions, the fishes of the seas would multiply so rapidly that within three short years they would fill the waters to such an extent that there would be no room for them to swim. This will hardly be disputed when it is known that a single female cod will lay 45,000,000 eggs in a single season. It is said that other fish, though not equalling the cod, are also wonderfully productive. A herring, six or seven ounces in weight, is provided with about 30,000,G00 eggs. After making all reasonable allowances for the destruction of eggs and of the young, it has been calculated that in three years a single pair of herrings would produce 154,000,000. Buffon says that if a pair of herrings were left to breed and multiply undisturbed for a period of twenty years, they would yield a fish-bulk equal to the bulk of the globe on which we live.

SHARKS.

A shark's egg is oddly unprovided with shell; but the contents are protected by a thick leathery covering almost as elastic as india-rubber. Its average size is 2 by 2 inches and is almost black in color. Sharks are frequently seen during a transatlantic voyage. The white shark is voracious and merciless, but the tiger of the sea, as the hammerhead is called, is worse than that. He is the most repulsive looking fish that swims. He will take up the trail of a ship like a bloodhound, and his persistency is menacing and malignant. A white shark can be frightened or beaten off even after seizing his prey, but the hammerhead shuts his jaws like a bulldog and will be cut to pieces before he will let go. A man in the water may dodge the rush of a white shark, but the tiger never misses his mark. He is slower, but surer than the other. He is about 30 feet long and about the size of a flour barrel. A white shark may follow a ship for 24 hours, but not longer, when he will go cruising around after food. A hammerhead, estimated to be 30 feet long,

followed the English ship Red Lion, 2,180 miles on a voyage to Australia. Food was thrown to him many times, but he would not touch it.

In October, 1893, the Norwegian bark Saigon, timberladen from Quebec to Sunderland, and disabled on her beam-ends in mid-ocean by a hurricane, was surrounded by a school of man-eating sharks. The crew clung to the rigging as the vessel sank lower and lower, until finally rescued by by boats from the British ship Victoria. Cheated of their prey the sharks leaped high around the boats, as if they meant to force their way on board. In 1871, the brig Southern Cross, from Calcutta to London, was wrecked on Nelson Island, at the northern end of the Indian Ocean, and three passengers and the crew of 14 men took to a raft. The wind blew them to sea instead of shoreward, and their raft was surrounded by hammerhead sharks during that morning. By sundown, when it was sighted by a north bound craft, only one of the 17 castaways was left. Although the sharks could not upset the raft, they had leaped upon it and knocked the men overboard. There are numerous instances where divers have had to combat sharks below the surface of the waves.

SWORD FISH.

The sword fish is the master of the seas among fish. In its encounters with whales the latter are invariably killed. They can sometimes do great damage to vessels. One capsized a large seine-boat, a few years ago, belonging to the fishing schooner Centennial, of Gloucester, and left part of its sword protruding through the solid planking and sheathing six inches above the boat's bottom. The Norwegian bark Lorenzo had quite recently a sample of the strength of a sword fish. Through the metal sheathing of her hull, then through six inches of planking, and penetrating the inner ceiling about three inches, the fish had driven its sword, resulting in a leak which kept the crew at the pumps for six hours a day. The "sword" was about 2 inches in circumference at the point, and 5 inches at the end where it had broken off, the piece being about 20 inches long.