152 FISHES I HAVE KNOWN 



edged with a beautiful blue king-fishes, deep red 

 in colour, and a kind of salmon (caught off the 

 Abrolhos rocks, four hundred miles away), which 

 readily takes the salt, small sword-fish, rock-cod, 

 albacore, bonitas, sea-eels, silver mullet, flying-fish 

 (caught after Barbados fashion, vide Chapter V.), 

 small porpoises, cuttles, rays, big gar-fish, young 

 sharks, and many other fish, unrecognisable, ugly, 

 but, as we were assured, edible. Here I may 

 remark that the Brazilians cook fish admirably, 

 and at all the restaurants in Rio and other large 

 cities, fish in great variety is a prominent item 

 of the menu. 



The great Professor Agassiz, before his well- 

 known visit to the Amazon region in 1865, stated 

 that he should consider himself well rewarded if 

 two hundred and fifty new species of fish were 

 discovered by his party of naturalists. But after 

 five months' labour, they had come across no 

 fewer than one thousand three hundred ! When 

 we consider that Linnaeus, in his sixth edition of 

 the " System of Nature," concluded that the 

 number of known species on the entire globe was 

 not more than three hundred, and that Captain 

 Wilkes, of the U.S. Navy, in 1840 collected only 

 six hundred in his three years' voyage round 

 the world, when three ships were employed, it 



