A LOST FEBRUARY 



line. No power to swoop, or soar, or ride the air; 

 scales instead of feathers; fins in lieu of quills; a 

 creature out of its element, making surprising head- 

 way there for a brief moment; very pretty and 

 novel, but, I fancy, showing none of the grace and 

 mastery that it does beneath the wave. At night one 

 fell upon the deck of the ship, caught up and car- 

 ried there, the officer said, by a gust of wind. I think 

 an ingenious person might construct a tin fish with 

 wings that would spin through the air in much tlie 

 same way. 



The flight of the fish is evidently its play, and not 

 its serious business in life, though it is suggested 

 that it is also a means of enabling it to escape its 

 enemies. These fish seemed on this occasion to be 

 racing with one another, like the dolphins, or as if 

 on a wager as to which could stay in the air the 

 longest and cover the greatest distance. 



If, in the evolution of animal life upon the globe, 

 the birds emerged from the fishes and reptiles, as 

 the biologists teach, is this sport of the flying-fish nil 

 that now remains of the grand impulse tliat brought 

 about that transformation ? An upward striving of 

 the creative energy that changed scales into feathers, 

 and fins into wings, and peopled the air with the 

 thousand forms of bird life, now sur\4ving only in 

 this pretty and odd freak of the flying-fish ? 



On the fourth day, in the midsummer tempera- 

 ture, we began to thread our way amid the tropic or 



225 



