8 The Field Naturalist's Quarterly Feb. 



they are to the national museum than to the epicure's dinner- 

 table, come in among the spoils of the sea — the mavu, as 

 the expressive French word has it,— so frequently at certain 

 seasons as to attract no further attention. The six here 

 chosen, then, on these grounds, are the angler-fish, the 

 chimsera, monk-fish, torpedo, weever, and sun-fish, not one 

 of which would ever find its way to the fishmonger's, save as 

 a curiosity shown with a view to attracting possible cus- 

 tomers for more agreeable wares. One or two shops in the 

 west end of London are particularly famous for these 

 monsters of the deep ; and many a time the writer, whose 

 friends know his eccentric fondness for such sights, has been 

 rung up on the club telephone to go down Bond Street or to 

 Charing Cross and inspect an unusually large angler or a 

 brilliant opah, while even in Bournemouth there is a shop 

 that makes a speciality of displaying trophies out of which 

 not the most cunning chef in Paris could in all probability 

 make a stew that would not offend the gorge of a Texan 

 cowboy. The last exhibit of the kind in the Bournemouth 

 shop was an immense angler-fish — the week before there 

 were a trio, consisting of a spotted dog-fish trawled in the 

 bay, flanked by a brace of monk-fish also taken from neigh- 

 bouring waters — which weighed over seventy pounds, and 

 which had the honour of being requisitioned for the national 

 collection at South Kensington. 



The Angler-fish {Lophius piscatorius), then, the first of our 

 uncommon sextette, is the very type of what an angler 

 should be — quiet, slow of movement, unobtrusive. It is not 

 a beautiful fish, for its head, like that of the sperm-whale, 

 must occupy a good third, if not more, of its total bulk, 

 while the mouth suggests, when distended to its full capacity, 

 nothing so much as the despairing legend in Dante. The 

 exact extent to which the ** angler " uses the rod-and-line 

 arrangement, which is in reality a prolongation of the dorsal 

 fin, is much disputed. Mr Cunningham, who has written 

 much of our sea- fish, seems inclined to doubt its more 

 constant use, particularly criticising the alleged phosphor- 

 escence of the " bait " at the end of the " line." A Bourne- 

 mouth correspondent of the ' Daily Graphic ' sent to that 

 publication a very admirable sketch of the above-named 



