90 Recreations of a Sportsman 



nothing but a kind of frill, hardly that, and of 

 little use. 



The dorsal or top fin was represented by a 

 long tooth-shaped fin which extends upward, and 

 on the lower side is another just like it, so if 

 you should stand on your head, or the fish should 

 turn completely over, it would look almost the 

 same, and from what I have seen of the fish 

 I am almost convinced that it has some doubts 

 as to which is the upper side, as it often affects 

 a happy medium and lies on its side floating in 

 the tides of summer. The fishes appear like 

 great faces as they move gracefully about, cer- 

 tainly among the strangest denizens of the sea. 

 They also look like moons or suns, and a common 

 name is sunfish (Mola). One of my boatmen 

 called them moons, and had seen them at night 

 in the shadowy depths, very reflections of the 

 moon, blazing with light, spectral, ghostly. 



I havehad various experiences with these fishes. 

 Upon one occasion I took one with a boat-hook 

 after a struggle off Boon Island, Maine. The 

 fish weighed possibly two hundred pounds. An- 

 other I saw run aground, like a ship, on the bar 

 of the St. John's River, Florida. The water was 

 very low and several lumber schooners had been 

 lying up-stream waiting for the conjunction of 

 high tide and down-stream wind. But the big 

 moonfish knew not of tides or winds; drawing 

 eleven or twelve feet of water, as clumsy as a 



