SCIENCE OF FLAT-FISH, OR SOLES AND TURBOT. 107 



organic perfectionment of the brain gives to the highest of the primates 

 the faculty of articulate speech ; that faculty, brought into play, gives 

 rise to an extremely rudimentary system of expression, the source of 

 which, as Lucretius has observed with much force and justice, lies in 

 an imperious need. This need is, in fact, the creator of words. Gradu- 

 ally the monosyllabic words become differentiated into principal words 

 and words of secondary signification. A new phase begins with the 

 closer association of words, and the different processes of derivation 

 develop themselves more and more. The third phase is characterized 

 at first by a remarkable synthetic process, which soon, however, under- 

 goes simplification, and yields under the influence of a more rapid 

 civilization to a more and more accentuated analytical precision. The 

 ultimate form has evidently not yet been reached by the English and 

 French languages ; but since language was born with man, and is his 

 single characteristic, though laboriously and slowly developed as all his 

 powers have expanded, it is destined to be transformed into more and 

 more perfect forms of expression as man himself continues to ascend 

 in the scale of superiority. Translated for the Popular Science 

 Monthly from the lievue Scientifique. 



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THE SCIENCE OF FLAT-FISH, OE SOLES AND 



TURBOT. 



" /~\NCE upon a time," says that delicious creation of Lewis Car- 

 \J roll's, the Mock Turtle, " I was a real turtle ! " Once upon a 

 time, the modern sole might with greater truth plaintively observe, I 

 was a very respectable sort of a young codfish. In those happy days, 

 my head was not unsymmetrically twisted and distracted all on one 

 side ; my mouth did not open laterally instead of vertically ; my two 

 eyes were not incongruously congregated on the right half of my dis- 

 torted visage ; and my whole body w r as not arrayed, like a Portland 

 convict's, in a party-colored suit, dark -brown on the right and fleshy- 

 white on the left department of my unfortunate person. When I was 

 young and innocent, I looked externally very much like any other 

 swimming thing, except, to be sure, that I was perfectly transparent, 

 like a speck of jelly-fish. I had one eye on each side of my head ; my 

 face and mouth were a model of symmetry ; and I swam upright like 

 the rest of my kind, instead of all on one side after the bad habit of 

 my own immediate family. Such, in fact, is the true portrait of the 

 baby sole, for the first few days after it has been duly hatched out of 

 the eggs deposited on the shallow spawning-places by the mother- 

 fishes. 



After some weeks, however, a change comes o'er the spirit of the 

 young flat-fish's dream of freedom. In his very early life he is a w r an- 



