PARENTAL CARE AMONG FRESH- WATER FISHES. 



By Theodore Gill. 



The l)elief long prevailed that fishes are indifferent to their eggs 

 and 3'oung and leave them entirely to the care of Mother Nature. 

 One who was more excellent as a man of letters than as a naturalist, 

 but who wrote, nevertheless, a very readable work on Animated 

 Nature, expressed the general belief once dominant. Oliver Gold- 

 smith, in 1774, told his readers that " fishes seem, all except the whale 

 kind, entirely divested of those parental solicitudes which so strongly 

 mark the manners of the more perfect terrestrial animals." '^ Many 

 to the present time entertain that belief. 



More than a score of centuries before Goldsmith, however, the 

 greatest naturalist of antiquity, Aristotle, told of a kind of fish, 

 inhabiting the largest river of Greece, the Macedonian Achelous, 

 which, in the person of the male parent, exerted the greatest care of 

 both eggs and young. That account, however, was overlooked or 

 neglected, and even regarded with skepticism and as fabulous. The 

 strange history of that fish — known to Aristotle as the glanis — will 

 be told at length in later pages of this article. Its truthfuhiess has 

 been vouched for, not by later observers of itself, but by studies of 

 related fishes having analogous habits in a quarter of the world 

 unknown to and undreamed of by Aristotle. iVlthough the most 

 detailed history of any fish by any ancient writer is connected with 

 it in the philosopher's History of Animals [Uepi Cgdgov iffTopiag 

 /3i/iXia), no reference to it appears in any modern popular work. 



Many important details respecting the life histories and parental 

 care of a large number of other fishes have been published from time 

 to time and may be found in the publications of various societies or 



a Many years before Goldsmith wrote, Linnfeus (1758) had I'ecognized the 

 impassible gap between true fishes and cetaceans and combined the latter 

 and the viviparous hairy quadrupeds in the class of mammals, but Goldsmith 

 urged that, "Although all our modern naturalists have fairly excluded them 

 from the finny tribes, and will have them called, not fishes, but (/rcat beasts of 

 the ocean," "yet, notwithstanding philosoi)hers, mankind will always have their 

 own way of talking; and for my part," continues Goldsmith. " I think them here 

 in the right." This thought indicates how little of a naturalist (Joldsmith really 

 was. 



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