120 MAY. 



infantile grace and beauty much more attractive than 

 the older ones we are accustomed to see on the fish- 

 monger's table. It flaps and flutters in impatience at 

 being dragged out of its element, and exposed to un- 

 genial air : we will quiet its anxiety by lifting it 

 into yonder shallow rock-pool. Now watch it. How 

 easily and gracefully it glides around its new abode, 

 moving along by an undulation of the edges of the 

 broad pectoral fins, a movement which Yarrell describes 

 as something between flying and swimming. Now it 

 lies still on the sand-floor of the pool, motionless, save 

 that the two oval orifices just behind the eyes are 

 constantly opening and closing, by the drawing across 

 each or back, of a film which exactly resembles an eye- 

 lid, and which on examination with a lens we see to be 

 edged with a delicate fringe. The action is so closely 

 like the winking of an eye, that an observer seeing the 

 fish for the first time might readily suppose the orifices 

 to be the organs of vision. They are, however, outlets 

 of the gills, called spiracles ; the ordinary gill-apertures 

 are five on each side, placed semi-circularly on the 

 inferior surface of the body, as you see when I turn 

 the fish on its back, a demonstration which it resents 

 and resists with all its might : these upper orifices com- 

 municate with the gill-chambers by canals, and you may 

 see the water now and then strongly driven out of them. 



