382 Pliny's natural history. [Book IX. 



that are covered with crusts ; the kinds of which are thirty 

 in number. We shall, on another occasion/^ speak of each 

 individually ; but, for the present, we shall treat only of the 

 nature of the more remarkable ones. 



CHAP. 17. (15.) — WHICH OF THE FISHES ARE OF THE LARGEST SIZE. 



Tunnies are among the most remarkable for their size ; we 

 have found one weighing as much as fifteen-" talents, the 

 breadth of its tail being five cubits and a palm.^^ In some of 

 the rivers, also, there are fish of no less size, such, for instance, 

 as the silurus^^ of the Nile, the isox^ of the Ehenus, and the 



cause in B. xxxii. c. 51, Pliny speaks of 174 different kinds of fishes, and 

 here he says that the Crustacea are thirty in number. Daubenton speaks 

 of the species of fishes as being 866 in number, while Lacepede says that 

 he had examined more than a thousand, but that was far below the . real 

 number. Cuvier mentions specimens of about 6000 kinds of fishes, in the 

 Cabinet du Roi. Ajasson remarks upon the learned investigations of 

 Cuvier on this subject, and his researches in Sumatra, Java, Kamschatka, 

 New Zealand, New Guinea, and elsewhere, for the purpose of increasing 

 the list of the known kinds of fishes. 



19 B. XXX. c. 53. 



2^ About 1200 pounds. Cetti, in his " Natural History of Sardinia," vol. 

 iii. p. 134, says that tunnies weighing a thousand pounds are far from un- 

 common, and that they have been taken weighing as much as 1800 pounds. 



21 The same as the Latin " dodrans," or about nine inches. This pas- 

 sage is taken almost verbatim from Aristotle, Hist, Anim. c. 34. Cuvier 

 says that this passage, although like the preceding one, taken from Aris- 

 totle, is much more incredible, (though Lacepede, by the way, disputes 

 Pliny's statement as to the weight of the tunny). " A distance," Cuvier 

 says, " of from seven to eight feet from one point of the fork of the tail 

 to the other, would denote a fish twenty-five feet in length ; and it must be 

 observed, that most of the MSS. of Pliny say hvo cubits." Ai'istotle, how- 

 ever, beyond a doubt says Jive. 



22 Now universally recognized as the sly silurus, or sheat-fish, called in 

 the United States the horn-pout, the Silurus glanis of Linnaeus. On this 

 formerly much-discussed question, Cuvier has an interesting Note. '* There 

 can now be no longer any doubt as to the silurus ; it is evidently synony- 

 mous with the 'glanis ' of Aristotle ; as we find Pliny, in c. 17 and 51, 

 giving the same characteristics of the silurus, as Aristotle does of the 

 glanis. Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 20, and B. ix. c. 37 ; such, for instance, as 

 the care it takes of its young, and the effects produced upon it by the dog- 

 fish and the approach of storms. It is easy to prove also that it is not 

 the sturgeon, [as Hardouin thought it to be], but the fish that is still called 

 ' silurus ' by the naturalists, the ' wels ' or ' schaid ' of the Germans, the 

 'saluth' of the Swiss, &c." 



23 Cuvier remarks, that it is by no means clear what fish is meant by 



