FISHES. 371 



CLASS IV. FISHES. (Pucet.) 



Vertebrated animals with cold red blood, respiring by gills or 

 branchice, and moving in the water by the aid of Jins. 



THOUGH fishes have been known and used as food from the 

 earliest ages, Aristotle is regarded as the first writer who has 

 considered them in a general view as forming a particular class 

 of animals. After him the work of Pliny, as in the other branches 

 of Natural History, may be considered as the great receptacle 

 of all the facts known to his time in regard to the history, cha- 

 racters, and manners of fishes. Among the comparatively mo- 

 dern writers on this subject, Belon, a French physician, who in 

 1551 published a work entitled Histoire des Poissons, is the 

 first who attempted to arrange the class in anything like con- 

 nected families. In one of his groups he placed Cartilaginous 

 flat fishes ; in another flat fishes not cartilaginous ; and in a third 

 and fourth, were separated the sharks and eels or elongated fish- 

 es, as marked by prominent and distinguishing characters. 



Some years after (1554) William Rondelet, professor of me- 

 dicine at Montpellier, published a work on fishes in one volume 

 folio, illustrated by figures from wood. Though this writer cannot 

 be said to have very much improved the scientific arrangement 

 of the class, yet his work is valuable for accurate specific descrip- 

 tions. The figures, too, are in most cases capable of being re- 

 ferred to their prototypes. In the same year, Hippolyto Sal- 

 viani, a physician at Rome, published a work entitled Aquati- 

 lium Animalium Historia, with good figures of many fishes. 



From this period a taste for the study of Ichthyology, as this 

 branch of Natural History has been termed, (from tyjug a fish, 

 and 'My 05 a discourse) seems to have been disseminated. But 

 passing over the intervening authors, we only notice that part 

 of the work of Aldrovandus, published in the beginning of the 

 following century, which treats of fishes, and where they are ar- 

 ranged according to their habitats, such as Littoral fishes, those 

 which are found among Rocks, and Pelagian or deep-sea fishes. 



