with the barren pleasure of catching these frightful creatures by a line and hook baited with a piece of sea crab. The animal approaches the bait with its spines flattened; but when hooked and stopped by the line, straight all its spines are erected, the whole body being armed in such a manner at all points, that it is impossible to lay hold of it in any part. For this reason it is dragged to some distance from the water, and there it quickly expires. In the middle of the belly of all these there is a sort of bag or bladder filled with air, and by the inflation of which the animal swells itself in the manner already mentioned.

In describing the deformed animals of this class, one is sometimes at a loss whether it be a fish or an insect that lies before him. Thus the hippocampus and the pipe fish bear a strong resemblance to the caterpillar and the worm; while the lesser orb bears some likeness to the class of sea eggs to be described afterwards. I will conclude this account of cartilaginous fishes with the description of an animal which I would scarcely call a fish, but that Father Labat dignifies it with the name. Indeed, this class teems with such a number of odd-shaped animals that one is prompted to rank every thing extraordinary of the finny species among the number; but besides, Labat says its bones are cartilaginous, and that may entitle it to a place here.

The animal I mean is the Galley Fish, which Linnæus degrades into the insect tribe, under the title of the Medusa, but which I choose to place in this tribe, from its habits, that are somewhat similar. To the eye of an unmindful spectator, this fish seems a transparent bubble swimming on the surface of the sea, or like a bladder variously and beautifully painted with vivid colours, where red and violet predominate, as variously opposed to the

beams of the sun. It is however an actual fish, the body of which is composed of cartilages, and a very thin skin filled with air, which thus keeps the animal floating on the surface, as the waves and the winds happen to drive. Sometimes it is seen thrown on the shore by one wave, and again washed back into the sea by another. Persons who happen to be walking along the shore often happen to tread upon these animals; and the bursting of their body yields a report like that when one treads upon the swim of a fish. It has eight broad feet with which it swims, or which it expands to catch the air as with a sail. It fastens itself to whatever it meets by means of its legs, which have an adhesive quality. Whether they move when on shore Labat could never perceive, though he did every thing to make them stir; he only saw that it strongly adhered to whatever substances he applied it. It is very common in America, and grows to the size of a goose egg, or some what more. It is perpetually seen floating; and no efforts that are used to hurt it can sink it to the bottom. All that appears above water is a bladder clear and transparent as glass, and shining with the most beautiful colours of the rainbow. Beneath, in the water, are four of the feet already mentioned, that serves as oars, while the other four are expanded above to sail with. But what is most remarkable in this extraordinary creature, is the violent pungency of the slimy substance with which its legs are smeared. If the smallest quantity but touch the skin, so caustic is its quality that it burns it like hot oil dropped on the part affected. The pain is worst in the heat of the day, but ceases in the cool of the evening. It is from feeding on these that he thinks the poisonous quality contracted by some West Indian fish may be accounted for. It is certain these animals are extremely common along all

the coasts in the Gulf of Mexico; and whenever the shore is covered with them in an unusual manner, it is considered as a certain forerunner of a storm.

PART III.

OF SPINOUS FISHES.

CHAPTER I.

THE DIVISION OF SPINOUS FISHES.

THE third general division of fishes is into that of the Spinous or bony kind. These are obviously distinguished from the rest by having a complete bony covering to their gills; by their being furnished with no other method of breathing but gills only; by their bones, which are sharp and thorny; and their tails, which are placed in a situation perpendicular to the body. This is that class which alone our later naturalists are willing to admit as fishes. The Cetaceous class with them are but beasts that have ta ken up their abode in the ocean; the Cartilaginous class are an amphibious band, that are but half denizens of that element: it is fishes of the spinous kind that really deserve the appellation.

This distinction the generality of mankind will hardly allow; but whatever be the justice of this preference in favour of the spinous class, it is certain that the cetaceous and cartilaginous classes bear no proportion to them in nuinber. Of the spinous class

are already known above four hundred species; so that the numbers of the former are trifling in comparison, and make not above a fifth part of the finny creation.

From the great variety in this class, it is obvious how difficult a task it must have been to describe or remember even a part of what it contains. When six hundred different sorts of animals offer themselves to consideration, the mind is bewildered in the multiplicity of objects that all lay some claim to its attention. To obviate this confusion, systems have been devised, which, throwing several fishes that agree in many particulars into one group, and thus uniting all into so many particular bodies, the mind that was incapable of separately considering each, is enabled to comprehend all when thus offered in larger masses to its consideration.

Indeed, of all the beings in animated nature, fishes most demand a systematical arrangement. Quadrupeds are but few, and can be all known: birds, from their seldom varying in their size, can be very tolerably distinguished without system; but among fishes, which no size can discriminate, where the animal ten inches and the animal ten feet long is entirely the same, there must be some other criterion by which they are to be distinguished; something that gives precision to our ideas of the animal whose history we desire to know.

Of the real history of fishes very little is yet known, but of very many we have full and sufficient accounts as to their external form. It would be unpardonable, therefore, in a history of these animals, not to give the little we do know; and at least arrange our forces, though we cannot tell their destination. In this art of arrangement, Artedi and Linnæus have long been conspicuous: they have both taken a view of the animal's form in different

lights, and from the parts which most struck them have founded their respective systems.

Artedi, who was foremost, perceiving that some fishes had hard prickly fins, as the pike; that others had soft pliant ones, as the herring; and that others still wanted that particular fin by which the gills are opened and shut, as the eel, made out a system from these varieties. Linnæus, on the other hand, rejecting this system, which he found liable to too many exceptions, considered the fins, not with regard to their substance, but their position. The ventral fins seem to be the great objects of his system: he considers them as in fishes supplying the same offices as feet in quadrupeds; and from their total absence, or from their being situated nearer the head or the tail, in different fishes, he takes the differences of his system.

These arrangements, which are totally arbitrary, and which are rather a method than a science, are always fluctuating, and the last is generally preferred to that which went before. There has lately appeared, however, a system, composed by M. Gouan of Montpellier, that deserves applause for more than its novelty. It appears to me the best arrangement of this kind that ever was made; and in it the divisions are not only precisely systematical, but in some measure adopted by nature itself. This learned Frenchman has united the systems of Artedi and Linnæus together; and by bringing one to correct the other, has made out a number of tribes, that are marked with the utmost precision. A part of his system, however, we have already gone through in the cartilaginous, or, as he calls a part of them the branchiostegous tribe of fishes. In the arrangement of these I have followed Linnæus, as the number of them was but small, and his method simple. But in that which is more properly called the spinous class