SKIMMING THE SURFACE 



creatures of the air (all of which were using man's 

 ''inventions" in principle long before he appeared on the 

 earth) we could possibly find all man's ideas and devices, 

 in embryo, in the ocean. 



There are about forty species of the gurnard, which is 

 one of the most extraordinary fishes in the sea. We are 

 considering it among surface fish, but most of the 

 gurnards live near the bottom, feeding on crustaceans, 

 molluscs and small fishes. 



The head of a gurnard is mailed and cuirassed, while 

 the gill-cover and shoulder-bones are covered with spines 

 having trenchant blades which give the fish its hideous 

 appearance, and account for some of its names : such as 

 sea-devil, sea-scorpion and sea-frog. Yet its glorious 

 colours — as beautiful as those of any fish in the sea — 

 have given the gurnard other names, less opprobrious, 

 such as sea-robin. The sapphirine gurnard, for instance, 

 is so named from the exquisite blue of its pectoral 

 fins. 



The most marked peculiarity of the genus is the 

 presence of three freely-moving finger-like rays in front 

 of the pectorals. These are furnished with elaborate 

 nerve-systems, and are organs of both locomotion and 

 touch. In the seas around Britain the commonest species 

 is the grey gurnard. The flying gurnard is somewhat 

 similar to this, but differs in having the fin-rays of the 

 pectorals connected by membranes or ''webs", by which 

 it is enabled to support itself in the air. 



The flying gurnard can walk on land, swim in the sea, 

 and fly in the air, so that it resembles a tank, submarine 

 and seaplane, all in one. 



Having given the gurnard so many extraordinary 

 qualities, its range of glorious colourings being not the 

 least of them, it almost seems that Nature decided to "go 

 the whole hog" and looked around for some other queer 

 faculty to bestow upon it, and chose (of all things) the 

 faculty of "speech", enabling the creature to make hog- 



43 



