The Flying Scorpion. 



435 



THE FLYING SCORPION. 



How admirable is Nature ! how extensive her power 

 and how various the forms with which she has sur- 

 rounded the united elements of animated matter ! From 

 the uncouth shape of the wallowing whale, of the un- 

 wieldy hippopotamus, or ponderous elephant, to the 

 light and elegant form of the painted moth or fluttering 

 hurnming-bird, she seerns to have exhausted all ideas, all 

 conceptions, and not to have left a single figure untried. 

 The fish represented above is one of those, in the out- 

 lines and decorations of which appear the discordant 

 qualities of frightfulness and beauty. Armed cap-a-pie, 

 surrounded with spines and thorns bristling on his 

 back, and fins like an armed phalanx of lance : bearers, 

 and decorated on the body with yellow ribands, inter- 

 woven with white fillets, and on the purple fins of 

 his breast with the milky dots of the pintado, the Sea 

 Scorpion presents a very extraordinary contrast. His 

 eyes, like those of which poets sang when celebrating 

 the Nereids and Naiads, consist of black pupils, sur- 

 rounded with a silver iris, radiated with alternate 

 divisions of blue and black. The rays of the dorsal fin 

 are spiny, spotted brown and yellow, conjoined below 

 by a dark brown membrane, and separate above; the 

 ventral fins are violet with white drops, and the iail 

 and anal fins are a sort of tesselated work of blue, 

 black, and white, united with the greatest symmetry, 



