149 



made him turn pale." M. Leblond concludes, from this and other 

 facts, that the fishes which eat the Physalia become a poison for those 

 who eat them, although it does not appear that he had any evidence 

 of the fish having ate the " galley," or any other poison. 



The habits of the Physalia are still imperfectly known, but among 

 the many strange forms of brilliant colour and elegant contour which 

 swarm in the warmer parts of the ocean, " none," says Gosse, " take a 

 stronger hold on the fancy of the .beholder ; certainly none is more 

 familiar than the little thing he daily marks floating in the sun-lit 

 waves, as the ship glides swiftly by, which the sailors tell him is the 

 Portuguese man-of-war. Perhaps a dead calm has settled over the 

 sea, and he leans over the bulwarks of the ship scrutinising this ocean- 

 rover at leisure, as it hastily rises and falls on the long, sluggish 

 heavings of the glassy surface. Then he sees that the comparison of 

 the stranger to a ship is a felicitous one, for at a little distance it 

 might well be mistaken for a child's mimic boat, shining in all the 

 gaudy painting in which it left the toy-shop. (Fig. 49.) 



" Not unfrequently, one of these tiny vessels comes so close along- 

 side, that, by means of the ship's bucket, with the assistance of a 

 smart fellow who has jumped into the ' chains ' with a boat-hook, it 

 is capMred, and brought on deck for examination. A. dozen voices 

 are, however, lifted, warning you by no means to touch ; t, for well the 

 experienced sailor knows its terrible powers of defence. It does not 

 now appear so like a ship as when it was at a distance. It is an 

 oblong bladder of tough membrane, varying considerably in shape, 

 for no two agree in this respect ; varying also in size, from less than 

 an inch to the size of a man's hat. Once, on a voyage to Mobile, 

 when rounding the Florida reef, I was nearly a whole day passing 

 through a fleet of these little Portuguese men-of-war, which studded 

 the smooth sea as far as the eye could reach, and must have extended 

 for many miles. They were of all sizes within the limits I have 

 mentioned." 



Generally, there is a conspicuous difference between the two 

 extremities of the bladder, one end being rounded, the other more 

 pointed, or terminating in a small knob-like swelling or beak-shaped 

 excrescence, where there is a minute orifice ; sometimes, however, no 

 such excrescence is visible, and the orifice cannot be detected. 



"That wonderful river," continues Mr. Gosse, in his nervous, 

 eloquent style, "with a well defined course through the midst of the 

 Atlantic the Gulf Stream brings on its warm waters many of the 

 denizens of tropical seas, and wafts them to the shores on which its 

 waves impinge. Hence it is that so many of the proper pelagic 



