CLEVER FISHES. 53 i 



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 

 oait, as deftly as ever angler coaxed gudgeons from the ooze of the 

 New River or salmon from the flashing torrent of the Spey. Wit- 

 ness this clumsy-looking monster the Fishing-Frog (Lophius pis- 

 catorhcs). Frightful and hideous is he, according to our vulgar notions 

 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 sacs 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 accord- 

 ance 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 ca- 

 pacity 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 fisher- 

 man 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 gud- 

 geons. 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 toward 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 skall in Scandinavia. It is a species of 

 hunt in which a number of sportsmen take in a wide space of ground, 

 where game exists, 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 descrip- 

 tion of porpoises making a skall upon sand-eels, written by the late Mr. 

 James Lowe, sometime editor of the Critic and "Chronicler" of the 



