Scale 1 : 38,300,000. Erhard.] Next to the tunny fisheries those of the sardines and anchovies are most important. Sea-urchins and other products of the sea are eaten by the inhabitants of the coasts, particularly in Italy, but there is no part of the Mediterranean where animal life is so abundant and so prodigious in quantity as on the celebrated banks of Newfoundland, or on the coasts of Portugal or of the Canaries. A large number of fishing-boats are engaged, not in the capture of fish, but in {31} the collection of articles of dress or of the toilet. The purple-shell fisheries on the coasts of Phœnicia, the Peloponnesus, and Greece are no longer carried on, but hundreds of boats are employed annually during the fine season in fishing for coral or sponges. Coral is found most abundantly in the western portion of the Mediterranean, and the Italian fishermen do not confine themselves to their own shores—to Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia—but also visit the Strait of Bonifacio, the sea off St. Tropez, the vicinity of Cape Creus in Spain, and the waters of Barbary. Ordinary sponges are collected in the Gulf of Gabes, and at the other extremity of the Mediterranean, on the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor, and in the straits winding between the Cyclades and Sporades. Sponges are usually found at a depth of from 12 to 150 feet, and can be gathered by divers; whilst coral occurs at far greater depths, and has to be wrenched off with an iron instrument, which brings up its fragments, mixed with ooze, seaweeds, and the remains of marine animalculæ. This industry is still in a state of barbarism: those devoted to it are not as yet sufficiently acquainted with the sea and its inhabitants to enable them to carry on the sponge and coral fisheries in a rational manner. Yet this they must aim at: they must learn how to deprive Proteus, the ever-changing deity, of his dominion over the inhabitants of the deep.