THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 163 
be worth while to give a few hints as to what might 
be done, by anyone whose curiosity has been excited 
by the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens 
and the Crystal Palace. 
An hour or two’s dredging round the rocks to the 
eastward, would probably yield many delicate and 
brilliant little fishes; Gobies, brilliant Labri, blue, 
yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and 
powerful protruding teeth ; pipe fishes (Syngnathi)’ 
with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) 
and snake-like bodies; small cuttle-fish (Sepiole) of 
a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, 
with a ring of suckered arms round their tiny 
parrots’ beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and 
dart in the water, as the skylark does in air, by 
rapid winnowings of their glassy side-fins, while they 
watch you with bright lizard-eyes ; the whole animal 
being a combination of the vertebrate and the 
mollusc, so utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had 
not the family been amongst the commonest, from 
the earliest geological epochs) it would have seemed, 
1 Plate XI. fig. 1. 
M 2 
