12 SALMONIA. 



only a few minutes before; and the hooks 

 seemed to have had no other effect than that 

 of serving as a sort of sauce jpiquante^ urging 

 them to seize another morsel of the same kind. 

 Phys. — Fishes are mute, and cannot plead, 

 even in the way that birds and quadrupeds do, 

 their own cause ; yet the instances you quote 

 only prove the intense character of their ap- 

 petites, which seem not so moderate as Whiston 

 imagined, in his strange philosophical romance 

 on the Deluge ; in which he supposes, that 

 in the antediluvian world the heat was much 

 greater than in this, and that all terrestrial 

 and aerial animals had their passions so ex- 

 alted by this high temperature, that they were 

 lost in sin, and destroyed for their crimes ; 

 but that fish, living in a cooler element, were 

 more correct in their lives, and were therefore 

 spared from the destruction of the primitive 

 world. You have proved, by your examples, 

 the intensity of the appetite of hunger in fishes ; 

 Spalanzani has given us another proof of the 

 violence of a diflPerent appetite, or instinct, in 

 a cold-blooded animal, that has most of the 

 habits of the genus — the frog ; which, in the 



