In plain English and fact,
whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of
respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies,
sciaenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimaeras dire,
which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles.
But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there are
exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits of
Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay of
Biscay, find the feeding good and the wind against them, and stay
there.
So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardere's hotel at Biarritz (he has
seen service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have at
dinner, day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny.
The first is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook when
he said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the
louvine is none other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the
Atlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is
a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn; a fish common
(with slight differences) to both sides of the North Atlantic; while
the sardine, the dorado, and the tunny (whether he be the true tunny
or the Alalonga) are Mediterranean fish.
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