THE MIND OF FISHES. 43 



to " drink like a fish," a comparison suggesting that a 

 fish is rather given to sensual indulgence than to intellectual 

 pursuits. Again, if a man's eyes have the lack-lustre 

 appearance which is often believed to indicate stupidity, 

 he is said to have " the eye of a fish ;" and when an -honest 

 attorney has in hand a case which contains too much 

 principle and too little law, he speaks of it in confidence, 

 and in a derogatory sense — as being " rather fishy." But 

 if proverbial phrases often owe their currency to their 

 innate truth, do they not also often merely prove the 

 subservience of human intelligence to unreasoning wit "i 

 The philosophic angler is free from vulgar prejudices; his 

 mind is not trammelled by hasty assumptions. The 

 patient disposition which the experience of many hours 

 spent in watching the shadows on the water generates, 

 and the knowledge of the frequent astuteness of his prey, 

 tend to preserve him from conclusions which, in the minds 

 of the many, are essentially dogmatic, and are, therefore, 

 not tolerable in good society. 



It may be contended that the voice of authority is on 

 the same side as prejudice in this case; and of this I fear 

 there can be no doubt. The great Cuvier places fishes 

 very low down in the scale of vertebrate intelligences. He 

 says of them : — • 



" Breathing by the medium of water, that is to say, only profiting by 

 the small quantity of oxygen contained in the air mixed with the water, 

 their blood remains cold ; their vitality, the energy of their senses and 

 movements, are less than in mammalia and birds. Thus their brain, 

 although similar in composition, is proportionally much smaller, and their 

 external organs of sense not calculated to impress upon it powerful sensa* 

 tions. Ushes are, in fact, of all the vertebrata, those which give the least 



