Body Covering 31 



ships, cathedrals, and women. Dogs are beautiful, in part at 

 least, because we see in thein creatures of undying and often 

 undeserved devotion to ourselves. Horses are associated in 

 man's mind with his moments of reckless gallantry — the 

 Charge of the Light Brigade, the pink-coated huntsman 

 bouncing over fences behind the hounds, the cowboy on his 

 bucking bronco. Ships are the tall vessels which man created 

 to carry him through storm and violence in his search for 

 new lands beyond the seas. Cathedrals represent his aspira- 

 tions toward God and toward immortality. Women — well, 

 the reactions of man toward women have been too often told 

 to need repeating here, and the reactions of other women to 

 them will never, in spite of all our researches, be known to 

 us if we are men. 



To the beauty of each of these the beholder contributes by 

 adding the beauty of his own emotions which the prophets 

 and the artists and the poets have taught him to associate 

 with them. The poor fish has no such advantages. No pity or 

 gratitude or love or excitement is stirred in us by the sight 

 of a fish. If a fish wants to be admired, it must forego these 

 enhancements, and produce for our contemplation some- 

 thing out of the ordinary in the line of pure, intrinsic beauty: 

 beauty of form, beauty of movement, beauty of color. And 

 this at last brings us back to the body covering, for on it 

 depends the fish's greatest claim to beauty, its coloring. Fish 

 can boast a brilliance, an iridescence, a variety of pattern, and 

 an ability to change color, unequaled by any other group in 

 the animal world, and in producing these results nature 

 makes use of a couple of devices which she has abandoned in 

 the animals higher up the ladder. 



The fish's iridescent hues are caused by crystals of a sub- 

 stance called guanin. These appear in their undisguised sil- 

 very whiteness under the transparent skin of the animal's 

 belly, but on its back they are overshadowed by the thick 



