WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. 165 



themselves like creatures unconscious of captivity and in the 

 enjoyment of perfect health. Whither, then, would he wish to 

 turn from the rugged tracks of forest life, from the haunts of the 

 wild boar and the wolf, if not to this attractive spot ? Every 

 hunter is, or ought to be, something of a naturalist ; and here, 

 at Concarneau, the faculty of his observation will be directed to 

 a new study to the nature and habits of animals, not such, 

 perhaps, as he has so long loved to pursue, but to denizens of 

 the deep, the finny tribe, vertebrate and non-vertebrate, whose 

 ways have hitherto been inscrutable and beyond the power of 

 man's ken. 



Of late years science has been busy in revealing what the 

 bowels of the earth contain : while its surface has been combed 

 in all regions to supply the beasts of the field, fowls of the air, 

 and creeping things of every kind for the use of our zoological 

 institutions and the cultivation of natural history ; but till 

 recently, although man was given " dominion over the fish of 

 the sea," as well as " over all the earth," by the great Creator of 

 the Universe, the study of life in the waters has received little 

 or no encouragement from the scientific of this or a former age, 

 the shroud of the fathomless deep acting as a barrier to all 

 investigation. Nevertheless, this neglect is somewhat remarkable, 

 especially if the great value set upon fish in the luxurious days of 

 old Rome be borne in mind, when seas were ransacked for the 

 most delicate of their kind, and the poet could tell his friends 

 what fish were best boiled and what roasted ; that the Peloris of 

 the Lucrine was a better fish than the Murex of Baise; and that 



" Non omne mare est generosae fertile testae." 



Again, one might have supposed that the interdiction of flesh- 

 meat to the whole Roman Catholic world at certain seasons of 

 the year, when a fish-diet, as tending to the mortification of the 

 body, was universally allowed, would long since have stimulated 



