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not in himself a lofty conception, rose even in the scale of imaginative being when he became a refuge and a consolation to his creator. The theatrical and conventional hero is henceforward a symbol, if nothing more, of a passionate, disappointed, reckless, and gifted man.

And all the poet's powers and perceptions expanded under the new stimulus. Let us select almost at random a landscape which is as far above the earlier conventional period as heaven is above earth, as Nature is to a signpainter's daub. Every thing is in it: sound and sight, and the sentiment of the scene, and its delicious mingling of sadness and devotion. We have but to shut our eyes, and the whole is before us; we have but to listen, and our heart is stolen out of our very bosom by the melody, the reality, the overwhelming, subdued emotion and melting calm.

"It is the bush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more:

"He is an evening reveller, who makes
His life an infancy, and sings his fill:
At intervals, some bird from out the brakes
Starts into voice a moment, then is still.
There seems a floating whisper on the hill;
But that is fancy, for the starlight dews
All silently their tears of love instil,
Weeping themselves away, till they infuse
Deep into Nature's breast the spirit of her hues.

"Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven,

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires, - 'tis to be forgiven,
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

"All heaven and earth are still, though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,

All is concentred in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence."

-

These lovely verses- and we know nothing of their kind more perfectly beautiful were written at the time when Shelley and Byron spent days and nights floating in their boat upon Lake Leman, and living a joint poetic life in sight of one of the fairest landscapes God has given to man. That man, and he the man who could write such lines, should desecrate this loveliest scene, and weave in with it another episode of discreditable story, is pitiful to think of; but at least it does not come into the verse. The evening calm is unbroken by any stale echo of socalled "passion: " the rose-tints of the sunset linger on the distant snow-peaks; the magical silence, all full of softened sounds, drops down like a benediction upon the two poets; the delicious night, which is but dim, not dark, envelops them. Let us not pry further into the aspects and thoughts of the two human creatures thus surrounded. Fate hung over them, threatening their youth with the visionary sword already suspended close to their heads. Shame and pain and bitter recompense of folly had already come to both. But a little way farther before each lay the path still wreathed in flowers, still full of those possibilities which are never quite shut out from young men, even those who have most wasted their gifts and strength. But soon those flowery ways were to end in darkness. The compassionate human spectator lingers with a painful sympathy

by their side in this moment of seeming calm. Both were strong in the sense of wrong, injured men in their own opinion, bearing the weight of England's intolerance, and incapacity to understand the minds of poets. But both were so young, spendthrifts of God's gifts, with no time before them to think better of it, no escape into a purer day possible for either. And howsoever we may blame and judge, as judge we must,- yet the gentle heaven judged not, but sent down its dews and star-rays softly through the enchanted twilight upon the two young, beautiful poets' heads, upon the two wasted lives. God help them! Lives more forlorn, amid all their wealth of nature and favoring circumstances, were never thrown away under those peaceful skies.

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Byron never returned to England: he lived a disturbed and wayward life in Italy, now moving from one storied city to another, now lingering in unknown corners, doing little but indulge himself and his fancies, and writing much which it might have been as well he had not written. We will not attempt to discuss the productions of his later years, a task which neither space nor inclination encourages; except, indeed, the greatest of all his works, the real and most lasting foundation of his fame. The Manfreds and Cains were but exaggerations doubly exaggerated of his favorite conventionalism; but "Don Juan is all real. To speak of this poem and of morality in the same breath is simple foolishness, and so must every attempt be to explain or justify its freedom. We believe that, as a mere question of art, the narrowness which limits a man's life to a series of continual indulgences in one favorite sin, and varying expressions of one passion, is as narrow as the creed of the poorest precisian who ever was scoffed at by poet. Libertinism is as limited, as cramping and confining, as petty a kind of bondage, as any puritanism; and "passion,' so called, has as little claim to be considered the grand spring of human movements, as any other of the manifold impulses which make or mar us. And at the same time no poem can take the highest rank of poetic excellence which confines itself to a certain audience, whatever that_audience may be. Byron boasts that he will not make "ladies' books al dilettar le femine et la plebe;" and this is a foolish vaunt, which we have heard repeated in our own day by various new poets, who think it finer to write for a class than for humankind. But it ought to be understood by all capable minds that this is a very poor and false piece of bravado. Humankind, man and woman, small and great, is more worth writing for than any section of it, even were that section the most gifted, the most wise and great minds of their time. The whole is greater than a part; and he who chooses for himself a limited audience, ought at least to have the good sense to perceive that he is not bigger, but less in his aim, than other men; an amount of perception, however, with which we are not allowed to credit the poets who profess to produce strong meat for men, and not milk for babes. Every such pretension is of its very nature an apology for littleness, little as it is intended so to be.

When we say this, we do not pretend to assert or to hope that in any but an ideal state of society it will be possible to maintain that poetry and morality must always go together. But we are confident in saying that few great poems, at least of those which have been written since Christianity began to affect the world (though even this limitation is scarcely necessary), are so interwoven with immoral situations and sentiments as to be inseparable from them, and to keep them continually before the reader. It is this characteristic which must always limit the fame of "Don Juan," a fault infinitely more serious than any amount of occasional aberrations into forbidden ways. Yet with all its manifold defects, there is an easy power and mastery in it, which, perhaps, more than any other poem of the time, gives to the reader the conception of strength and capacity almost unbounded. This setting aside not only its morality, but its moral tone (two quite distinct things), and even setting aside the wonderful beauty of many passages, is the thing which strikes us most. The poet manages a measure by no means facile with the perfect ease of one to

whom words are absolutely subject, and who can weave them as he likes, now spiendidly, now fantastically, now with the most tragic, and now with the most trifling meaning, but always with an invincible grace, facility, and lightness of touch, which fill the mind of the critic with a purely technical and professional admiration, in addition to the admiration which he must share with every lover of poetry. The melodiousness of the strain never glides, as it does in Shelley's hands, into mere music, dropping the thread of articulate thought; every thing is clear; every incident and detail, every vicissitude of the much-prolonged and lingering narrative. How it must have flowed forth, as natural, as easy as common talk, as spontaneous-boundless so far as the writer's capacity went, limited only by intention and such poor human details as time and space, which keep the flood within inevitable channels! Even the occasional (and very occasional) jars in the verse give us a sense of careless force, never of poverty. That Byron did not take the trouble to alter here and there a defective line, seems part of the very freedom and ease and careless spontaneity of the strain. Thus it is strength. the sense of gigantic exertion without any strain of power, put forth as lightly as a child's play, yet as effectually as if the earth had been rent by the effort, which is the first great charm of the poem. With that hand so strong, so deft, so easy, so all-capable, what might not the poet do if he would? We are lost in admiration of his vast capacity, his smiling and careless power.

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This is the first and greatest quality of "Don Juan." The exquisite passages with which the poem abounds, the absolute lucidity and distinctness of the narrative, and this sense of strength and ease and grace and infinite capability, give to it a claim upon all who love and understand poetry. But when we have said this, we have stated only its real claims to greatness. It has another claim to another kind of greatness, which has also been responded to largely, and which perhaps will continue to be responded to as long as men are such as they are. The figure of Don Juan himself carries out all we have said of the popularity of a vulgar and conventional ideal. Once more, we have the very climax and apotheosis of commonplace in this handsome young hero, made of coarse flesh and blood, washed over with just that lacquer of outside refinement and sensibility which the vulgar love, who roams from love to love, and from adventure to adventure, always lucky, always safe to get clear of any scrape in which he finds himself. Such a personage is the incarnation of fine fancy to all commonplace and prosaic minds. Poor poet, who did not write books to delight the people! It is at once his glory and his shame that he himself loved no other ideal than that which is the god of the plebe; and it is the plebe only meaning thereby no social class, but those minds which, irrespective of rank, occupy the lowest imaginative level, and are content with the poorest ideal to whom his revelation was addressed. Cynicism is generally supposed to address itself to a more intellectual class; but the cynicism of "Don Juan is exactly of the kind which delights the vulgar, and is their highest conception of superiority. This beautiful, daring, fortunate young hero goes about the world and sees the same weaknesses everywhere, and laughs. He is not ill-natured. the contrary, he asks no better; he takes advantage of the imperfection of Nature, and caresses her, and smiles, and goes on. They are all the same, high and low, old and young, he says with perfect complacency; he sees through them all, and does his best to please, and takes whatever he can get, and nods aside at the spectators. He has the ease, the grace, the strength of a god, and he has the soul of a costermonger. Heaven forgive us! there are virtuous costermongers as there are virtuous peers; and why we should thus stigmatize a class we know not. But this hero of poetry, this epic impersonation of man, is of the commonest and meanest mental type of humanity. His superiorities are all superficial; he is comprehensible through and through: there is neither depth nor mystery nor any secret in him that can confuse the vulgarest reader. And, accordingly, the vulgar, the plebe, whom the poet af

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fected to despise, those who in ordinary cases stare and gape at poetry,- rose up and gave their coarse, unaccustomed hand to that other half of the world which prepares the thrones and pedestals of fame; and between them, while the song was still warm on his lips, this strange pair placed Byron on his pinnacle; an elevation half of real greatness, half of false fame; a place perhaps unparal leled in poetry, and entirely unique in England. Thus it was, that, without pause or interval, Byron won every thing, in point of reputation, which the world has to give.

We need not linger upon the later portion of his life. It had a kind of love in its last chapter which gave him a kind of happiness, perhaps the only kind of love and happiness of which he was capable. His death was like his life, a mixture of the real and the false, of tragedy and mock tragedy, of some genuine generosity and sentiment, and a great deal of counterfeit. Amid the wild, confused, and bewildering melodrama of Greek emancipation, amid strangers, with theatrical shouts in his ears and operatic figures grouped about him, far away from any true affection or friend more trusted than an old servant, he died in the full flower of his days, — Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. No more was granted to him, no time of reflection, no afternoon of thought. Never was life less happy, more forlorn and wasted, and never was end more pitiful. And thus all was ended upon earth for a man who had received every gift which Heaven could bestow upon a human creature; every gift except the one of knowing how to use the glorious faculties which God had put into

his hands.

CLEVER FISHES.

WHETHER we owe many of the matters we are about to glance at to fishes or no, it is certain that the fishes possessed them long before we did; and though man may be said to have invented them, yet in his savage state he must have taken more or less of hints from nature, and have adopted the methods which nature pointed out to him as the most effective in hunting or war (which were his principal occupations), whenever they could be adapted to his needs and appliances. However this may be, it is certainly singular that we should find so many existing similarities of a peculiar kind between the habits and attributes of men and fishes. For example, there is scarcely a sport we practise or a weapon of offence that we use which has not a parallel among fishes. As to weapons, daggers, spears, swords, are all possessed by fish in a very high state of natural perfection, and even guns have a representative institution among fishes. A shooting-fish would no doubt be looked upon almost as a lusus naturæ by the average Englishman, who rarely includes ichthyology amongst his studies: a fact which is very much to be lamented. for we have large national interests bound up in that science; in fact, we owe a great deal more to fishes than any other nation, not even excluding the Dutch, some of whose cities were formerly figuratively described as built on fish-bones; and a professional chair of Ichthyology at the universities would be by no means an unwise institution. It is not many years since that a review, which was published in an influential paper, dealing, amongst other things, with this special point, contemptuously dismissed the fact of there being such a thing as a shooting-fish as a traveller's tale. The ignorance amongst the general public on every thing relating to fish is at times perfectly surprising. I have seen small worthless bass passed off as gray mullet; I have seen even nasty gravid pond-roach hawked about as gray mullet; I have seen large bass actually sold for salmon at one of our fashionable watering-places. After this, if the Londoner constantly buys coarse, dry, tasteless bull-trout as fine Tay salmon, it is not to be wondered at. The Eton boy hastening home for the holidays provides himself with a tin tube and a pocketful of peas. We beg the present Etonian's pardon; we should have said he used to do so formerly, when there were boys at Eton, and, backed by s.me skill as a marksman, therewith constituted himself an

intolerable nuisance to every village and vehicle he passed on his road home. The Macoushee Indian makes a better use of his blow-tube; he puffs small arrows and hardened balls of clay through it with unerring aim, doing great execution amongst birds and other small game. Now the chaetodon, which is more or less a native of the eastern seas from Ceylon to Japan, rather perhaps resembles the Macoushee Indian than the Eton boy, though his gun, shooting-tube, or blow-pipe, or whatever it may be termed, is a natural one. His nose is really a kind of "beak," through which he has the power of propelling a small drop of water with some force and considerable accuracy of aim. Near the edge of the water is perhaps a spray of weed, a twig, or a tuft of grass; on it sits a fly, making its toilet in the watery mirror below. Rostratus advances cautiously under the fly; then he stealthily projects his tube from the water, takes a deadly aim, as though he were contesting for some piscatory Elcho shield, and pop goes the watery bullet.

"Poor insect, what a little day of sunny bliss is thine!" Knocked over by the treacherous missile, drenched, stunned, half-drowned, she drops from her perch into the waters below, to be sucked in by the chaetodon. But if we have fishes who can shoot their game, we have also fishes who can fish for it; ay, and fish for it with rod and line and bait, as deftly as ever angler coaxed gudgeons from the ooze of the New River or salmon from the flashing torrent of the Spey. Witness this clumsy-looking monster, the fishing, frog; frightful and hideous is he according to our vulgar ntions of loveliness, which the lophius possibly might disagree with. The beast is sometimes five or six feet in length, with an enormous head in proportion to the rest of its body, and with huge sacks like bag-nets attached to its gill-covers, in which it stows its victims: and what a cavernous mouth! Surely a fish so repulsive and with a capacity so vast and apparently omnivorous, would frighten from its neighborhood all other fish, and would, if its powers of locomotion were in accordance with its size, be the terror of the seas to fish smaller than itself: but Providence knoweth how to temper its gifts, and the lophius is but an indifferent swimmer, and is too clumsy to support a predatory existence by the fleetness of its motions. How, then, is this huge capacity satisfied? Mark those two elongated tentacles which spring from the creature's nose, and how they taper away like veritable fishing-rods. To the end of them is attached by a line or a slender filament a small glittering morsel of membrane. This is the bait. The hooks are set in the mouth of the fisherman down below. But how is the animal to induce the fish to venture within reach of those formidable hooks? Now mark this perfect feat of angling. How does the Thames fisherman attract the gudgeons? They are shy; he must not let them see him, yet he must draw them to him, and he does it by stirring up the mud upon the bottom. "In that cloud of mud is food," say the gudgeons. Then the angler plies his rod and bait. Just so the lophius proceeds, and he too stirs up the mud with his fins and tail. This serves not only to hide him, but to attract the fish. Then he plies his rod, and the glittering bait waves to and fro like a living insect glancing through the turbid water. The gudgeons, or rather gobies, rush towards it. "Beware! beware!" But when did gudgeon attend to warning yet? Suddenly up rises the cavernous Nemesis from the cloud below, and "snap!" the gobies are entombed in the bag-net, thence to be transferred to the lophius's stomach, when there are enough of them collected to form a satisfactory mouthful.

But we have still other sportsmen fish; we have fish who hunt their prey singly, or in pairs, or even in packs, like hounds. The reader, possibly, has never witnessed a skäll in Scandinavia. It is a species of hunt in which a number of sportsmen take in a wide space of ground, where game circle, drawing a cordon around it, and narrowing their circle little by little, and driving the game together into a flock, when they shoot them down. There was, some years ago, a capital description of porpoises making a skäll upon sandeels, written by the late Mr. James Lowe, some time editor

of the Critic and "Chronicler" of the Field, who saw the sight while fishing near the Channel Islands with Peter le Nowry, the pilot. Having searched for this passage several times, without being able to find it, I am reluctantly compelled to quote from memory. They were fishing off Guernsey, when Mr. Lowe called Peter's attention to several porpoises, which seemed to be engaged in a water frolic, swimming after one another in a circle. "That is no frolic, but very sober earnest for the sand-eels," said Peter. "Now," he continued, "I will show you a sight which I have only chanced to see two or three times in my life, and you therefore are very lucky to have the opportunity of seeing it at all. There is a great shoal of sand-eels yonder, and the porpoises are driving them into a mass; for, you see, the sand-eel is only a very small morsel for a porpoise, and to pick them up one by one would not suit Mr. Porpoise, who would get hungry again by the time he had done feeding on them singly; so they drive them into a thick crowd, in order that when they make a dash at them they may get a dozen or two at a mouthful. But, as we want some for bait, we will join in the hunt." And they edged down to the spot till they were within the circle. The porpoises, following one another pretty closely, were swimming round, now rising to the surface, now diving below, and gradually contracting the circle. The terrified sand-eels were driven closer and closer, and in their fear came to the surface all about the boat; and just as two or three porpoises made a dash into the crowd, snapping right and left, the fishermen plunged their nets into the water, and brought them up quite full of these little fish. Of course the shoal soon broke up and dispersed; but the skill with which the skäll was conducted, and the beauty of the sight, were much dilated on by Mr. Lowe, and it must have been a very interesting one.

There are many fish which hunt their prey singly, as the pike and trout, and the way in which a large pike or trout will course and run down a smaller fish resembles nothing so much as a greyhound coursing a hare. Now the unhap py little fish turns from side to side in its efforts to escape, while its pursuer bends and turns to every motion, following close upon his track, and cutting him off exactly as a greyhound does a hare. Now he rushes amongst a shoal of his fellows, hoping to be lost sight of in the crowd and confusion; but the grim foe behind is not to be baffled or deceived, and singling him out and scattering the small fry, which fly in all directions, ruffling the surface of the water like a sudden squall of wind in their fright, follows up his victim with unerring instinct. In an agony of terror, the poor little quarry springs again and again frantically from the water, only to fall at last exhausted into the gaping jaws of his ravenous foe, who, gripping his body crosswise in his mouth, sails steadily away to his lair, there to devour his prey at leisure. Other fish hunt their food, like dogs or wolves, in packs, as does the bonito chase the flying-fish; and one, perhaps, of the fiercest, most savage, and resolute of these is the pirai, of South America. So fierce and savage are these little pirates, when their size and apparent capability is taken into consideration, that their feats of destructiveness are little short of the marvellous. Stand forth, then, "pirai" of the Carib, "black, saw-bellied salmon of Schomburgk; so called, doubtless, from the possession of the peculiar adipose fin, common only to the salmon tribe, though in no other respect does it resemble a salmon, there being positive structural differences between the species. Let us take the portrait of this fish. Doubtless the reader figures to himself a fish of "a lean and hungry look," a very Cassius of a fish, with the lanthorn jaws of a pike. But, in fact, the pirai is somewhat aldermanic and like a bream in figure, with a fighting-looking kind of nose, and a wondrously expressive eye, cold, cruel, and insatiable, and like to that of an old Jew bill-discounter when scrutinizing doubtful paper. There is seventy or eighty per cent in that eye at the very least, and ruin to widows and orphans unnumbered if they come in its way. If it were a human eye, the owner would be bound, sooner or later, to figure at execution dock. The jaw is square, powerful, and locked into a very large head for the size of the fish; and that is

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a fat, plump head, too, but radiated over with strong bone and gristle. The teeth- ah! they would condemn him anywhere; for here is a fish sixteen inches long, with the teeth almost of a shark. Schomburgk speaks thus of its destructive power:

"This voracious fish is found plentifully in all the rivers in Guiana, and is dreaded by every other inhabitant or visitant of the river. Their jaws are so strong that they are able to bite off a man's finger or toe. They attack fish of ten times their own weight, and devour all but the head. They begin with the tail, and the fish, being left without the chief organ of motion, is devoured with ease, several going to participate of the meal. Indeed, there is scarcely any animal which it will not attack, man not excepted. Large alligators which have been wounded on the tail afford a fair chance of satisfying their hunger, and even the toes of this formidable animal are not free from their attacks. The feet of ducks and geese, where they are kept, are almost invariably cut off, and young ones devoured altogether. In these places it is not safe to bathe, or even to wash clothes, many cases having occurred of fingers and toes being cut off by them."

Schomburgk then relates astonishing instances of their voracity, in which the toes of the river-cavia are eaten off; a large sun-fish devoured alive; ducks and geese deprived of their feet, and walking on the stumps. Of course the lines which are used to capture them have to be armed with metal to prevent their being cut through. Their voracity is marvellous, and any bait will attract them the instant it is thrown into the water. Precaution is necessary, however, when the fish is lifted out of the water, or it will inflict serious wounds in its struggles. The fisherman therefore has a small bludgeon ready, with which he breaks their skulls as soon as they are caught.

Thus there are fish which shoot their prey, which fish for it, which course it and hunt it in various ways. There are others which employ other fishes to hunt it up for them, as we use pointers and setters; such as the little pilot-fish, which leads the huge shark to his prey; though this has been disputed, because the pilot-fish has been known to follow and play about a vessel just as it does usually about the body of a shark. The probability is that the 'pilot-fish is a species of parasite or diner-out, who will make particular friends with any big person who will feed him, and no doubt would find food in the refuse cast from the vessel, even as he would from the fragments torn off by the shark when feeding on any large body. Doubtless, too, there is a certain amount of protection obtained from consorting with monsters against other predacious fish. The fact of the pilot-fish conducting the shark to his prey has been disputed; but veritable instances related by eye-witnesses leave no doubt that at times it does fulfil this office for the shark. Nor is there any thing singular in the fact. The pilot-fish is on the lookout for his own dinner, probably, but will not venture on it until his protector has helped himself. We have numerous instances of this both in human and beast life.

In weapons of offence, besides the shooting apparatus already mentioned, fish have, first, the sword. This is represented by the blade of the sword-fish. This fish possesses a tremendously powerful weapon, backed as it is by the great weight and impetus which it can bring to bear upon its thrusts. Many instances have been known in which the bottoms of ships have been pierced through by the sword of the xiphias. Ships sailing quietly along have received a shock as if they had touched a rock, and when they have been examined after the voyage the broken blade of the fish has been found sticking in the ship's side. In the United Service Museum, there is, or was formerly, a specimen of the sword-fish's handiwork in this respect. A portion of the weapon is shown sticking into the timbers of a ship, having pierced the sheathing and planking, and buried itself deeply in the stout oak knee-timber of the vessel. Xiphias would, however, be terribly bothered with the change in naval architecture; and we are inclined to wonder what he would make of an iron-clad. Perhaps a little rough experience in this direction may make him more chary of indulging naughty tempers, and he may be taught quâ Dr. Watts, that, like little children, he "should not

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let his angry passions rise." If so, the cause of humanity will be strongly pleaded by the iron-clads, and the poor, clumsy, harmless whale will be the gainer. The xiphias frequently weighs five or six hundred pounds. The rapidity with which it can cut through the water is very great. It is a great enemy to the whale, and it is generally surmised that it mistakes a ship sailing through the water for a whale, and dashes at it with indiscriminating rage, often breaking and losing its sword by its blind fury. Persons bathing have not always been entirely safe from this fish, but have been stabbed to death by the xiphias. One instance of this occurred in the Bristol Channel, near the mouth of the Severn, in which a small fish of some seventy or eighty pounds' weight was the malefactor. They abound in the Mediterranean, and a hunt after, with the harpooning and slaying of the xiphias, is usually a work of time and much excitement. Akin to the sword-fish in their offensive capabilities are the saw-fishes, though their weapons resemble rather such as are used by certain savage tribes than civilized saws. Nor does the word " saw correctly describe them. They are terrible weapons, however and the Indians who edge their spears with sharks' teeth' almost reproduce artificially the weapon of the saw-fish. The largest of them, Pristis antiquorum, is commonly found to grow to the length of fifteen or sixteen feet. The elongated snout is set upon either side with sharp spikes, thickly dispersed, and somewhat resembling the teeth of the shark. It forms a most fearful weapon, as the poor whale has good reason to know, to whom it is also a deadly enemy. There are several members of the saw-fish tribe; one of the most peculiar is the Pristis cirratus, or cirrated saw-fish, of New South Wales. In the saw of this fish the teeth are irregular, one long and three short ones being placed alternately. The weapon of the narwhal - which by the by is not strictly a fish, but a member of the Cetacea found chiefly in the Arctic seas is the most perfect specimen of a very complete and efficient spear, being composed of the hardest ivory, and tapering gradually to a point. But what the special purpose of this spear is, is not known; whether it is used as a means of attack upon its enemies, or to secure its prey, or whether it is a mere implement for digging a passage through opposing ice-floes, as is often supposed, we can but conjecture. It is a very singular fact that the spear of the narwhal is always situated on one side of the nose, chiefly the left; it does not project from the middle of the head: it is no long snout or horn, but an elongated tooth or tusk. The narwhal, when young, has the germs of but three teeth. Sometimes two of these become developed and grow out spiked tusks, pointing in divergent directions; oftener, however, but one is the mature result. Whatever the use of this formidable spear may be, we know that it is very excellent and valuable ivory; but for any minute information as to the natural history of the animal itself, we should have to rely chiefly upon the knowledge of the Kamtchatkans, which amounts to little more than that it is good eating, produces much oil, and is possessed of a valuable tooth.

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Of daggers various we have many specimens, more particularly amongst the family of the Raiida; and fearful weapons they are, some of them being serrated or barbed, and capable of inflicting terrible lacerated wounds. In most of these fish the dagger, or spine, is situated on and some way down the elongated tail; and as the animal has great muscular power in the tail, and is able to whirl it about in any direction it may desire, it not unfrequently deals forth most savage retribution to its captors. It knows full well, too, how to direct its aim; and it is told of some of the members of this family that if a hand, or even a finger, be laid upon the fish, it can, by a single turn of the tail, transfix with its spine the offending member. So dangerous are the consequences of these wounds, that it is customary (and in France and Italy it is made compulsory by law on the fishermen) to cut off the tails above the spines of the fish thus armed before they are brought to market; and in this way almost the only specimen of the eagle-ray ever captured alive in this country was mutilated; so that the specimen was useless. The picked dog-fish is also pro

vided with two short, sharp spines, one on each dorsal fin. Many other fish are furnished with spines, either upon the fins, or as horns, or in sharp projections from the gill-covers. The spines of the greater and lesser weaver inflict most painful wounds, and cause such agony that it is commonly reported they are in some way venomous. This has been denied, and demonstrated to be impossible; yet it seems difficult to account for the following facts upon any other hypothesis. Sir W. Jardine, in speaking of the greater weaver, says:

"It is much dreaded by the fishermen on account of its sharp spines, which are usually considered as venomous, but without any sufficient reason, as they are quite devoid of all poisonous secretion. Mr. Couch states that he has known three men wounded successively in the hand by the same fish, and the consequences have in a few minutes been felt as high as the shoulder."

Again, in treating of the lesser weaver, "if trodden on by bathers, as frequently happens, it inflicts," says Dr. Parnell," a severe and painful wound, causing the part to swell and almost immediately to assume a dark brown appearance, which remains for five or six hours."

In the teeth of the confident assertion of great authorities it would be rash to say that any poisonous secretion exists. But if the above facts be quoted as proofs or instances of the absence of venom, they would appear to be singularly infelicitous ones.

Perhaps one of the most formidable weapons possessed by any fish is the natural and terrible pair of shears formed by the jaws of the shark. The only parallel weapon of offence that can be cited as used by man would, perhaps, be the spiked portcullis, but the future may present us with steam shears with blades ten feet long, and intended to receive cavalry: who knows? There is no telling where the ingenuity of modern inventors in the destructive line may lead us. But there are not many instruments so efficient for their purpose as the tooth of a shark. It is difficult to handle one freely without cutting one's fingers; and when we consider the tremendous leverage of a shark's jaws employed against each other like scissors, armed with rows of lancets, it is evident that nothing in the shape of flesh, gristle, or bone could withstand them. Their capacity, too, is equal to their powers; for a pair of jaws taken from a shark of not more than nine feet long has been known to be passed down over the shoulders and body of a man six feet high without inconvenience. It was thought to be an act of very unusual strength and dexterity on the part of the Emperor Commodus to cut a man in two at one blow; but the jaws of the white shark find no difficulty whatever in executing that feat. The vast number of teeth contained within the shark's jaw has been accounted for by some writers on the hypothesis that they are erected when the shark seizes its prey, at all others times lying flat on their sides. It is now, however, more generally admitted that the shark only employs the outer row of teeth, and that the inner ones are a provision of nature against an accident which is, and must be, a very common one when the implements are considered, and the force with which they are employed, viz., the breaking of a tooth. In this case the corresponding tooth on the inside becomes erect, and is by degrees pushed forward into the place of the broken one—a wondrous and very necessary provision to keep so delicate and powerful an apparatus as the shark's jaw always in order. The voracity of the shark forms an endless resource for the writers on the marvellous whose bent lies towards natural history. Whole ships' crews have been devoured by sharks ere now, while their omnivorousness is extraordinary. This is well exemplified by the observation once made to me by an old tar, who was dilating on the variety of objects he had found at one time or another inside the bellies of

sundry sharks. "Lord love ye, sir," quo' Ben, "there bain't nothin' as you mightn't expec' to find in the insides o'a shirk, from a street pianny to a milestone."

Continuing the description of the variety of weapons exemplified in fishes, we have a rival of that terrible scourge, the knout, in the tail of the thresher, or fox-shark (Alopias vulpes). The upper lobe is tremendously elon

gated, being nearly as long as the body of the fish, and amazingly muscular. It is curved like the blade of a scythe in shape, and the blows which it can and does inflict with this living flail can be heard at a great distance; a herd of dolphins is scattered as though they were mere sprats by one stroke of the thresher's tail; and stories of the combats between the whale on the one side and a combination of threshers and sword-fish on the other are too common to need more than a reference here. The form of battle usually consists in the sword-fish stabbing the whale from beneath, and so driving him up to the surface, when the fox-sharks spring upon him, and with resonant blows from their fearful knouts drive him below again upon the of their allies. weapons

The lasso is a weapon of some efficacy amongst various people; a form of lasso was even used by the Hungarians, and with great effect, in the war of Independence. It consisted of a kind of long-lashed whip, with a bullet slung at the end of the lash. And we have a sort of living lasso in the foot of the cephalopod. The cephalopods are the polypes of Aristotle, and belong to the mollusks. They are of the first order of invertebrate, or spineless animals. Mollusca cephalopoda is the style and title of the family Cephalopoda, in English meaning "foot-headed;" that is, its organs of locomotion, or the greater part of them, are attached to its head, whence they radiate, for the most part, in long, tough, and pliant tentacles or arms, of great muscular powers. On these tentacles are placed rows of suckers of very singular construction, which singly or simultaneously adhere with great tenacity to any object they come in contact with. The arms are extended in all directions when seeking prey. In the centre of them, in the middle of the stomach as it were, is the mouth of the creature, which is fully as curious as the rest of its anatomy, and consists of a large and strong hooked beak, similar to a hawk's or parrot's. A fish or other creature comes within reach, and is instantly lassoed by one of the tentacles, the others winding around it also to secure it in their folds. It is compressed tightly and drawn down to the beak, which rends and devours it at leisure, escape from these terrible folds being almost impossible.

The arms are also the means of propulsion, and are used as oars, by the aid of which the octopus manages to progress through the water with considerable rapidity. Mr. Wood, in his popular natural history, treats on this point as follows: "All the squids are very active, and some species, called 'flying squids' by sailors, and ommastrephes by naturalists, are able to dash out of the sea and to dart to considerable distances;" and he quotes Mr. Beale to show that they sometimes manage to propel themselves through the air for a distance of eighty or one hundred yards, the action being likened to a something which might be achieved by a live corkscrew with eight prongs. In the account given in Bennett's "Whaling Voyage," they are often spoken of as leaping on board the ship, and even clear over it into the water on the other side. Nature has also furnished the cephalopod with another curious weapon of offence, or defence rather, in the shape of a bag of black fluid, or sepia, commonly termed by fishermen the ink-bag; and what a dreadful weapon of offence or defence ink may be, in many cases, there are few of us unaware. The cuttle when closely pursued sends out a cloud of it to hide him from view, and escapes under cover of it.

Some of the cephalopods possess extraordinary powers of muscular contraction, as the common squid, for example, which is spread out at one moment in a body and volume larger round than a large man's fist, and the next moment will contract itself so that it can easily pass through the cork-hole in a boat or the neck of a wine-bottle. Great sensational attraction has been directed to the octopus by the tremendous description of the combat in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea." No doubt a large octopus, such as are found in the Pacific and elsewhere, and which sometimes have arms of eight or nine feet in length, could drown a man with the greatest ease, if he had no weapon and was caught by one under water. From remote ages the deeds of the polypus have been chronicled by poets

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