440 Dr. E. P.Wright on the Transportation of Living Fish, 



my guest for the day, I returned once more to shore. It 

 was about 10 o'clock in the evening when I again got on 

 board, and in the meanwhile two of my fishes had died. I 

 placed the rest in a water-jug ; and though they were in rather 

 a sickly condition, they soon revived ; one, however, jumped 

 out of the jug unnoticed, and thus lost his life ; the remaining 

 six lived on, in apparently the best of health, until I reached 

 Suez. The fresh water in the Seychelles is very full of iron ; 

 the water on board the ^ Erymanthe,' from being kept in iron 

 tanks, was also impregnated with the same metal ; and I was 

 in the habit of pouring out a quantity of the water each morn- 

 ing, and filling the jug up again with fresh water let fall from 

 some distance, so as to aerate it as much as possible. Every 

 fly caught on board was given to the fishes ; and I took advan- 

 tage of my few hours sojourn at Aden to lay in a small store of 

 insects, with which to regale them while in the Red Sea. At 

 Suez I was detained for some time by the custom-house officers, 

 but at last succeeded in getting the fish, birds, and leopard 

 (it went by the name of a cat) into a railway carriage other- 

 wise unoccupied. Just as the train was about to start, the 

 officials came to take the leopard from me ; but by this time I 

 had let her loose in the carriage, and when she saw their dark 

 faces (she never had at best a fancy for blacks), she jumped 

 up to get at them in a manner that so alarmed them that they 

 at once ran away and left us alone. After a few hours railway 

 travelling, I found the fish beginning to gasp for air ; the 

 motion of a railway carriage so churns the water, that it soon 

 becomes unbreathable. I, however, changed the water at 

 Cairo, and brought them alive to Alexandria : here I placed 

 them for a couple of days in a glass vase of Nile-canal water ; 

 but, whether from its coldness or from its being so full of 

 mud I know not, in one night two died. I then got some 

 rain-water, placed a piece of iron in it, and left it in the 

 kitchen of my friend's house, and the others seemed to be all 

 right. From Alexandria to Marseilles we had a very cold and 

 stormy passage ; but still I landed at Marseilles with my four fish 

 alive ; they went with me to, and spent a whole day and night at 

 Hy^res, and they then commenced what was to them a journey 

 of death towards Paris. The jolting of the express train was 

 very great, and ere we reached Lyons two had died : here I 

 changed the water, and had still hopes of bringing the remain- 

 ing two to London. To avoid the shaking as much as possi- 

 ble, I had suspended the bottle from the ceiling of the coupe ; 

 but at Dijon a lot of people got into it, and I was obliged to 

 bundle up all my possessions into a small corner on the floor.; 

 and so it happened that when daylight dawned, and we stopped 



