64 Spinning for Mahseer. ('matt v. 



" footfall or footstep, from those of all other individuals. They 

 " attend to the one and are indifferent to the other." And Sir 

 J. Emerson Tennent, in his very interesting " Natural History of 

 Ceylon," has remarked, not without force, that " organs of hearing 

 " have been clearly ascertained to exist not only in fishes, hut in 

 " mollusca. In the oyster the presence of an acoustic apparatus of 

 '■ the simplest possible construction has been established by the 

 '• discoveries of Siebold, and from our knowledge of the reciprocal 

 " relations existing between the faculties of hearing and of pro- 

 " ducing sounds, the ascertained existence of the one affords 

 " legitimate grounds for inferring the co-existence of the other in 

 "animals of the same class." Still it is not necessary to my argu- 

 ment that the communication should be made even by sounds 

 inaudible to the human ear. It is equally comprehensible that, as 

 in the case of ants and animals, they may be made by distinct 

 means, means of which we have no knowledge. 



It has been remarked above that it is difficult to conceive how 

 any creatures who habitually live in collected numbers could pos- 

 sibly order their conduct so as to live harmoniously, unless they 

 had the power of freely interchanging their ideas. May not such 

 a remark have equal pertinence to fish as to birds ? Is it not 

 equally applicable to such fish as swim in shoals ? Torpoises, for 

 instance, act very obviously all in concert, and the change, from one 

 unity of purpose, to another unity of purpose, is made with such 

 rapidity, and such a complete embracing of every individual of the 

 school, that it is easier to believe that the new idea was in some 

 way communicated, than to believe that it was not. Gregarious 

 fish, such as the herring and the pilchard, could scarcely conduct 

 their migrations in unison if they had not all a common intent 

 arrived at by communication. The simultaneous manner in which 

 avast shoal of fish will descend from the surface of the sea to 

 deeper water points also in the same direction It is well known 

 to anglers that you may catch dace after dace out of a shoal till 

 you have hooked ami lost one in the landing, and that then you 

 will ordinarily get no more dace out of that shoal. How is this to 

 be accounted for except on the supposition that they have powers 

 of communication analogous to those of gregarious animals on land ' 

 Exceptional days there are certainly, that come once or twice in a 



twelvemonth, when nothing will dissuade the dace from taking as 



h 



