414 PLINY'S NATURAL HISTOKY. [Book IX. 



says, that the shell-fish which did this service are duly ho- 

 noured in the temple of Venus, 9 at Cnidos. Trebius Niger 

 says that this fish is a foot in length, and that it can retard 

 the course of vessels, five fingers in thickness ; besides which, 

 it has another peculiar property when preserved in salt, and 

 applied, it is able to draw up gold which has fallen into a well, 

 however deep it may happen to be. 9 * 



CHAP. 42. (26.) FISHES WHICH CHANGE THEIR COLOUR. 



The msena changes 10 its white colour, and in summer be- 

 comes swarthy. The phycis 11 also changes its colour, and 



9 Venus was fabled to have emerged from the sea in a shell. 



9 * Rabelais refers to these wonderful stories about the echeneis or remora, 

 B. iv. c. 62 : " And indeed, why should he have thought this difficult, seeing 



that an echeneis or remora, a silly, weakly fish, in spite of all the 



winds that blow from the thirty-two points of the compass, will in the 

 midst of a hurricane make you, the biggest first-rate, remain stock still, as 

 if she were becalmed, or the blustering tribe had blown their last ; nay, 

 and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out 

 of the deepest well that ever was sounded with a plummet ; for it will 

 certainly draw up the precious metal." 



10 Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B, viii. c. 34 ; JElian, Hist. Anim. B. xii. c. 

 48. Rondelet is of opinion that this msena was the fish still called menola 

 by the people of Liguria and Rome. It was a fish little valued, and we 

 find it called by Martial, "inutilis msena," B, xii. Epigr. 30. Cuvier 

 says, that if it does not change from white to black, as Pliny states, its 

 colours are much more lively in the spring. It also has an offensive smell 

 at certain times, as is noticed by Aristotle, Hist. Anim, B. viii. c. 30, and 

 to which Martial alludes in the above epigram. Ovid also mentions it as 

 a fish of no value ; held, in all probability, in the same degree of estimation 

 as a sprat with us. It is, no doubt, the Sparus maena of Linnaeus. 



11 We learn from Aristotle, B. viii. c. 30, that the phycis was a whitish 

 fish, which in the spring assumed a variegated colour. In an Epigram of 

 Apollonides it is called "red;" and Speusippus, as quoted in Athenaeus, 

 B. v., says that it is similar to the perch and the channe. Ovid speaks of 

 it as frequenting the shore, and Oppian represents it as dwelling among 

 the sea- weed on the rocks. It also lived on shrimps, and its flesh was 

 light and wholesome ; while its most singular property was that of making- 

 its nest among the fucus or sea-weed, whence its name. All these charac- 

 teristics, Cuvier says, are to be found, from what Olivi states, in the "go" of 

 the Venetians, found in the Adriatic, the Gobius of Linnaeus ; the male of 

 which in the spring makes a nest of the roots of the zostera in the mud, 

 in which the female lays her eggs, which are fecundated by itself, and 

 then protected by it against the attacks of enemies. This is probably the 

 fish that is alluded to by Ovid, Halieut. 1. 121, "The fish that imitates, 

 beneath the waves, the pretty nests of the birds." 



