some respects the most characteristic of all, the
strangest in form, and the most distinctly adapted
to such a medium. Although, indeed, we find
marine quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles, these
involve exceptional modifications of the structure
of animals which usually breathe air and move
on land or through the atmosphere, while, on
the other hand, it is a rare exception to find
fishes capable of existing for more than a short
time out of water; notwithstanding the flying-
fish and the Pegasus that haunt the air, the
perch that climbs trees, the frog-fish that can
crawl about a room, the hassar that travels a
whole night from one pool to another, or the
goby that burrows deeply into clay.

Fishes breathe by means of the air contained
in water, and are suffocated if their gills or
breathing apparatus become dry. They move
not only by fins and tail-contrivances of the
nature of flexible oars well adapted to beat the
water, but also by means of the wonderful
flexibility of their bodies, which glide and slip
through the water with perfect ease. Living in
a medium of nearly the same specific gravity as
themselves, they have scarcely any weight to
support, and float at any depth without effort.
Some, indeed, are usually limited to certain
depths, but this seems rather for the sake of
food than for any other reason.

They progress with a rapidity impossible to
other animals whose density is so much greater
than the medium they move through, as to
require constant muscular effort to advance at all;
and, thus we find that when a ship is sailing or
steaming at its swiftest speed, fishes will quietly,
and without apparent effort, swim round and
round the ship as if she were at rest, and
continue to accompany her from day to day for
hundreds of miles. No words can do justice to the
bright colours, the quaint and droll or ugly forms,
or the singular appendages, of fishes.

The Ray of warm seas, with its broad flat
angular body, twelve or fifteen feet wide,
terminated by a tail five feet long armed with a
sharp arrow point conveying poison to the wound
it makes, is as unsightly and disagreeable an
animal as can well be imagined, while the little sea-
horse of the Mediterranean is in the highest
degree picturesque, resembling the mediæval figures
of a flying dragon. The globe-fish and porcupine-
fish are bladders stuck all over with spines; the
sun-fish resembles the head and shoulders of a
larger animal cut off shortly and abruptly by
some accident; the sea-wolf attains a length of
six or eight feet, and has a formidable apparatus
of teeth, compared with which even the alligator
or the shark seems powerless; the sword-fish
and saw-fish are provided with weapons capable
of piercing and being completely buried in the
keel of a ship; and a curious fish called the
angler, or sea-devil, catches its food by means
of a natural line, consisting of two slender
appendages to the head, slightly flattened and
broadened at the extremity, which, by their
colour, attract the unwary prey while the owner
is buried in mud or sand.

The sea is highly important as a never-failing
source of food to the human race; but few facts
in the history of our race are more extraordinary
than the prejudice which permits enormous
quantities of this valuable food to be wasted and
neglected where it is most plentiful. The lower
classes in Ireland would, in many cases, rather
starve than eat the fish with which their shores
abound; and elsewhere the feeling with regard
to particular kinds of fish is often so strong that
no motive or hard necessity is sufficient to
induce a hungry population to try the experiment
of converting them into food.

But there are (as we all know) some kinds
generally accepted, and of these the consumption
is almost inconceivable. In shoals miles
in length, and so thickly congregated that
there is no room for a boat, the common herring
rushes annually to the north-western coast of
Europe, filling all the lochs, fiords, and inlets
from Norway to Normandy. More than half a
million fish have been taken in one night by a
single boat. Upwards of two hundred millions
of fish have been exported in one year from one
port in Sweden, and about four hundred sloops
are employed in the herring trade at Yarmouth,
three of which alone, belonging to the same
proprietor, landed, in the year 1857, nearly four
millions of fishes. Nor is the herring the only
animal thus abundantly supplied; instances are
on record of twenty-five millions of pilchards
having been taken on shore in one port in a
single day. Even of cod, a much larger fish,
the quantity taken each season cannot average
less than two hundred and fifty millions; and
other fish, as the mackerel, the salmon, and the
tunny, rank among the principal food at
certain seasons of the year, of large populations of
several European countries.

Nature has amply provided for this vast
consumption and destruction of full grown fishes.
The cod annually produces more than nine
millions of eggs, and the sturgeon more than seven
millions: while flat fish, mackerels, and herrings,
all multiply by millions to maintain their kinds
against their numerous enemies. There is no
fear of the supply of fish failing out of the ocean,
but almost all kinds, especially those which come
in large multitudes at fixed seasons, are subject
to occasional and apparently capricious wanderings.
The varieties of temperature during
different seasons, may, in some measure, account
for this, but not entirely; and the open water
habits of the animals require more study than
has hitherto been devoted to them to enable us
to determine many points in their natural history.

Fishes are chiefly obtained from near shore or
in shallow water, but there is no reason to doubt
that they occasionally occupy considerable depths.
The crustaceans also—the crabs and lobsters, the
shrimps and prawns and cray-fish—are met with
either exclusively in the neighbourhood of land
or in some of those great masses of seaweed that
float in open water in the mid-Atlantic. Crustaceans
are very curious animals. Commencing life
with a head preposterously large in proportion
to its size, the young crab emerges from the
egg with a long forked tail but no body, and