214 The Field Naturalist's Quarterly August 



markable to what an extent bright colouring is softened 

 and modified and toned down in the water. How brilliant 

 a fish, seen on the foreshore as the tide recedes, is the male 

 lump-sucker, or " cock-paidle," as they call him on the 

 Scotch coast ; yet how dull a couple looked in the Brighton 

 tanks when last I saw them ! Nature has not yet given 

 ichthyologists a silvery flatfish ; or rather, one ought per- 

 haps to say, man has not yet succeeded in bringing such a 

 fish to light in his trawls or deep-sea dredges. One of these 

 days, perhaps, we shall be confronted with one, and then 

 it will soon be no more of a wonder than the black 

 swan. 



Colour-changes in living fishes are not common, though 

 every angler knows how soon the delicate tints fade after 

 death. Indeed, in the case of the red mullet, the bright 

 red colour is not only preserved for market purposes, but is 

 even intensified by the prompt removal of the outer scales 

 after capture. There is, it is true, a native of South 

 American streams known as the " Chameleon Fish," but 

 whether there is any analogy between its habits in this 

 respect and those of the reptile from which it takes its 

 name, I am not sufficiently acquainted with the fishes ol 

 that region to say, nor have I been able to find any infor- 

 mation on the subject in Dr. Federico Delfin's compact 

 Catalogo de los Peces de Chile, the latest brochure on the 

 fishes of that part of the world. 



It has often been pointed out that the fishes of tropical 

 and subtropical seas are on the whole far brighter than our 

 own. As the fisherman goes south, indeed, he meets with 

 increasingly bright-hued spoil. I was struck almost on my 

 first outing with the brilliancy of such Australians as the 

 sergeant baker, the nannygai, and the snapper. Even in 

 the Mediterranean I have caught breams and wrasses far 

 more smartly dressed than those on our own shores. It 

 must, however, be borne in mind that the sun shines more 

 brightly overhead, the sky remains longer free of clouds, in 

 those countries, and consequently the bright raiment may 

 in itself, with such a background (again, remember that the 

 natural enemies of fishes are other fishes, and that their 

 standpoint is not that of a fisherman standing on the 



