eye. The snout is of a reddish gold colour,
the head purplish, the iris purple and light blue.
At the neck is a bright bar like gold, more than
half an inch wide, running vertically; and then
for an inch to the beautifully shaped pectoral
fin, the throat is deep purple; directly after this
comes a bar of golden yellow. From this point
the upper part of the side is of a rose colour,
shading off above almost into black, and passing
below into a faint greenish hue, and then into a
decided yellow. The dorsal fin is a narrow
streak of bright canary yellow at the top;
beneath this begins quite abruptly a blackish
purple hue, which passes into a greenish straw
colour. The lofty crested fish snake (ophichthys
altipinnis) is a splendid animal, but also not a
very pleasant one to catch. It is a fine powerful
eel, more than three feet long, with a large
mouth and pointed head. The colour above is
olive green; beneath and in front, it is Indian
red passing into a reddish hue behind; all along
underneath it is speckled; the colour of the
back is divided from that of the belly by a very
sharp line of demarcation. The pectoral fin is
of a beautiful purple, but the dorsal fin is
calculated to give it a thorough snaky look, for
not only is it marbled all over with Indian red,
greenish yellow and brown, but it rises up
almost immediately behind the head so as to
look like a hood. The eye is very fine, having
one ring of blue, another of purple, and a third
of bright yellow. The teeth, however, are not
nearly so formidable as in some others.

Time and space fail fast, and we must push
on past other eels till we stop at the serpent fish
Bonaparte (ophichthys Bonapartei). It is a finely-
proportioned eel, from two feet to two feet and
a half long, with a pointed head most beautifully
marbled with the palest brown and brown
almost of a purple hue, parted from each other
by sharp trenchant lines of colouring, and
running all over the head in islets and creeks.
From the head backwards it is barred with purple
brown, and a mixture of Indian red and golden
green, the colours being very distinct. The
bars themselves are shaped thus: the dark ones
are wide below, then narrow inwards, and then
swell out gradually to become round at the top,
which reaches half way up the dorsal fin. Being
nearly as wide as they are deep, they resemble
in shape the old-fashioned coarse jars or pipkins
turned upside down. The dorsal fin rises almost
from the head; it is of a golden straw colour,
and, besides being marked here and there with
the bars, is dotted with brown purple spots.
Then come more eels still. Tapeworm eels, not
a third of an inch deep, and nearly, if not quite,
half a yard long; green and gold eels, wonderfully
slender and elegant in their figures, with
diamond-shaped tails; eels coloured gold, shaded
with Indian red and brown; others, coloured
dark Indian red, brown, and white, with pectoral
fins the hue of brickdust; many of them fine
large fish, strong enough to test the temper of
the best bamboo rod, or try the toughness of the
best gut and Kendal hook ever made. Eels,
again, with scarcely a vestige of fin, and that
only at the tail; some, coloured as if they had
been dipped into a paste of red brick and mashed
olives; eels that would take pages and pages to
describe.

And now comes the most beautiful eel in
the world. It is not merely the shape
of the creature (the leiuranus colubrinus),
though that is faultless; "Oh no, it is something
more exquisite still"—the colouring.
This superb eel is about half a yard long,
and only about half an inch deep, with a most
elegant narrow dorsal fin, like a straw green
silk cord lying along its back. From the tip of
its snout to the tip of its tail, it is barred with
yellowish nankeen and rich golden brown, both
colours of the greatest delicacy and purity.
The brown bars are shaped somewhat like a
Minié bullet, with the narrow end of the cone
turned downwards. The head, eye, and mouth,
are extremely small and elegant.

The last eels to be here mentioned are the
echidnæ, nasty disgusting things, with a fleshy
newt-like look, to which the thick dorsal fin,
continued from the head over the tail, and the
thick speckling with a dirty-meat like colour,
which almost entirely covers some of them, in
no slight degree contribute. The xanthospilos
is one of the most remarkable. Though not
really much stouter than the English eel, it
looks much heavier, has a fleshy appearance, and
is spotted in a most singular manner for a fish:
the ground in the body being dark brown
throughout, and lighter brown in the fin; all
over the surface are sown bright golden
spots, mostly round or oval in shape, and
not bigger than a split pea; a few, however,
are somewhat lengthened out. There are four
parallel rows of spots on each side. In all
these echidnæ the eye is remarkably small: for
instance, in this fish it is not more than the tenth
of that of a conger on the same page, an animal
only a little longer. The variegated echidna is
nearly two feet long, and slender, being not
much more than an inch thick at the thickest
part. This fish is streaked all the way along, fin
and all, with bright golden bars upon a dark
brown ground. It is, however, difiicult to say
that these shades of colour can be called bars, or,
indeed, to say what they can be called; for though
tolerably uniform in respect to breadth, the
golden stripes are mottled with many little
irregular islets of brown, that they look like
colour which has flowed upon glass: while each
bar of brown colour bears from one to several
spots of bright yellow, generally clustered into
groups. The many-zoned echidna (echidna
polyzona) is perhaps the cleanest built of these
strange fish, but even it has a little of the newt-
like look; something of the cut you would
expect to see in the inmate of some cool dark
grot, or an old Asian tank not kept over sweet.
But it is very pretty in its way. Octavia might
have put it in her bosom in lieu of a lizard, and
Cleopatra might have paired it with the "pretty
worm of Nilus." It is not above six inches long;
the head is exceedingly small, and the tail
pointed; it is of a beautiful clear brown colour,