354 NATURAL HISTORY. 



Many are the stories, some wonderful, all strange, which have clustered 

 around this fish. Authors will tell you that it hops friskily about on the 

 beach when left stranded, and that the peculiar tufted spine on the head is 

 a veritable fishing-rod. The little fish, they say, cluster round it in the 

 belief that some choice morsel is there, and that suddenly it strikes them, 

 and knocks them into the cavernous mouth yawning below. In these 

 stories, we are afraid that there is more fiction than fact. 



Another tale, almost as fanciful, is that related by Mr. Kent. He 

 regards the fishing-frog as one of the most perfect mimics in the whole 

 realm of nature ; but the present writer, although he has seen many of 

 these fish alive and under the most favorable circumstances, has failed to 

 see such remarkable features as the Englishman points out. Certainly his 

 resemblances are strained, but still we must let him speak for himself. 

 " The fish," says he, " while quietly reclining on the bottom of its tank, 

 presented a most astonishing resemblance to a piece of inert rock, the 

 rugose prominences in the neighborhood of the head lending additional 

 strength to this likeness. This resemblance being recognized, it was found 

 on a little closer inspection that the fish constituted, in connection with its 

 color ornamentations, and manifold organs and appendages, the most perfect 

 facsimile of a submerged rock, with that natural clothing of sedentary 

 animal and vegetable growths common to boulders lying beneath the water, 

 in what is known as the Laminarian Zone. In this manner the numerous, 

 simple or lobulated membranous structures dependent from the lower jaw, 

 and developed as a fringe along the lateral line of the body, imitate with 

 great fidelity the little, flat, calcareous sponges, small, compound ascidians, 

 and other low-organized zoophytic growths that hang in profusion from 

 favorably situated sub-marine stones. That famous structure known as 

 the angler's ' rod and bait,' finds its precise counterpart in the early grow- 

 ing phase of certain sea-plants, such as the oar-weed, while the more pos- 

 terior dorsal fin rays, having short lateral branchlets, counterfeit in a like 

 manner the plant-like hydroid zoophytes. One of the most extraordinary 

 mimetic adaptations was, however, found in connection with the eyes, 

 structures which, however perfectly the surrounding details may be con- 

 cealed, serve, as a rule, to betray the animal's presence to a close observer. 

 In the case of the angler, the eyes, during life, are raised on conical eleva- 

 tions, the sides of which are separated by darker longitudinal stripes into 

 symmetrical regions, the structure, as a whole, with its truncated summit 

 on which the pupil opens, reproducing, with the most wonderful minute- 

 ness, the multivalve shell of a rock-barnacle. To complete the simile, the 

 entire exposed surface of the body of the fish is mapped out by darker, 

 punctated lines into irregular, polygonal areas, whose pattern is at once 



