286 SUPPLEMENT ON 



eye, which leaves between the eye and the bones a large and 

 deep foss, something of which is already perceptible in pelor. 



This species seems to be rare, and its habitation generally 

 is the various parts of the Indian Ocean. 



The Synanceia brachio is called by the Negroes of the Isle 

 of France^-^, or the hideous, and they hold it in the utmost 

 horror. In fact, nothing can be more frightful : one would 

 scarcely call it a fish, but a mass, an unformed lump of cor- 

 rupted jelly. Totum corpus, says Commerson, muco squali- 

 dum et quasi ulcerosum. Its head and limbs are enveloped 

 as it were in a sack, by a thick skin, soft, spongy, altogether 

 wrinkled and verrucose, like that of a leper, variegated with- 

 out any order, by little clouds of whitish, grey, brown, and 

 divers other tints ; sometimes it appears entirely black ; but 

 it is always gluey and disagreeable to the touch. It scarcely 

 suffers the little eyes to appear upon the huge or cavernous 

 head. The dorsal appears to be rather a series of small 

 tubercles than a fin. The broad and short pectorals appear 

 intended to surround the neck like a frill, rather than to serve 

 as organs of natation. This ugly fish possesses very great 

 tenacity of life, and can subsist for a long time out of the water. 

 The skin, like that of pelor, can form in the upper part of the 

 gills, above the point of the operculum, a little ring, which re- 

 mains open independently of the gill itself; so that the fish, 

 when it pleases, respires through that, leaving the rest of its 

 branchial operculum closed, and consequently without expos- 

 ing its gills to desiccation. 



The inhabitants of the Isle of France regard it rather as a 

 sort of reptile than a fish, and the fishermen dread its sting 

 more than that of the viper or the scorpion. There is reason, 

 however, to believe that the wounds which it inflicts are not 

 of themselves more envenomed than those of other fishes of 

 the same family, and that the accidents which are consequent 

 upon them proceed from the depth to which the slender and 



