imid are here
found fighting like gladiators: the eels bite everybody within their
reach--one of these combative eels caught by our author measured
twelve feet three inches; the fresh-water prawns "strike so sharply
with their tails as to draw blood if not carefully handled." The
exquisite polyps and anemones, whose painted beauty our author is
never weary of relating, have mostly poisoned weapons concealed under
their flounces, and treat the naturalist who would coquet with them
to a swelled arm or a lamed hand. Centipedes, scorpions and virulently
poisonous snakes animate the land, while the shoals, where the natives
declare there are "more fish than water," teem with every sort of
man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from
each interstice of the coral-reef. The latter, often of immense size,
are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting
nothing else: they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and
thread it on a string slung round the neck. The horror of the lobster
for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and it affords a gauge for
the sensitiveness of crustaceae (and incidentally an argument against
those who maintain the greater reasonableness of fishing than of
hunting on account of the lower organization of the prey) to learn
that the lobster must not be taken to market in company with the
cuttle-fish, "or the flesh will be spoilt before he gets there, the
creature being literally sick from fright." Meantime, in the ooze
which forms a connecting link between sea and shore lurks the
mud-laff, indescribably hideous in shape, leprous-looking, slimy, and
darting a greenish poison through the spines on its back. Treading on
one of these, the poor naked fisherman is apt to die of lockjaw;
and Mr. Pike's kitten, having its paw touched with a single spine,
perished of convulsions in an hour. Some of the sea-carnivora,
however, are so beautiful that one is ready to forgive their more or
less Clytemnestra-like tempers. Of some gymnobranchiata the writer
observes: "I never saw any living animals with such gorgeous
colors--the most vivid carmine and pure white, mixed with golden
yellow in the bodies and mantles, and the gills of pale lemon-color
and lilac. No painting could give an idea of the harmony of the
shades as they blended into each other, or the undulating grace of the
movements of the mantles. I have sat for an hour at a time watching
them, lost in admirat