53 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 naturae by the aver- 

 age Englishman, who rarely includes ichthyology among 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 professorial 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, among 

 other things, with this special point, contemptuously dismissed the fact 

 (as a traveller's tale) of there being such a thing as a shooting-fish. The 

 ignorance among 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 some skill as a marksman, there- 

 with 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 among 

 birds and other small game. Now, the Chcetodon (C/mtodon ros- 

 tratus), 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 Chretodon. 



