OUVIEK'S BODIAN. 



looking as if dashed hastily with one sweep of a brush, and a still shorter stripe of the 

 same colour runs along each side of the head just above the eye. From the eyes are 

 drawn two wider stripes of rich golden yellow, which pass beneath the lateral line, and 

 run to a considerable distance, the lower streak being continued as far as the tail fin, and 

 the upper reaching to the middle of the soft portion of the dorsal fin, where it turns 

 slightly upwards. 



IN the fish represented in the accompanying illustration, the reader may see one of 

 those remarkably coloured species for which the warmer seas are so famous, and whose 

 vivid colouring and striking forms put to shame the comparatively sober inhabitants ol 

 the northern waters. 



What connexion there may be between colours and caloric is one of the unsolved 

 enigmas of creation, and though it is most evident that such a connexion exists, its 

 principles and even its results are at present shrouded in mystery. 



CUVIEB'S BODIAN. Piagramma linedtum. 



The tints which decorate the finny inhabitants of these tepid waters are brilliant beyond 

 all power of description, and the most glowing colours of the artist, though painted on 

 a ground of burnished gold, fail to convey more than a dim idea of the wondrous chromatic 

 effects produced by the living creatures. Even the patterns in which these colours are 

 arranged are as unexpected as they are effective, and the art student would gain no slight 

 knowledge of that most difficult science of colour, were he to visit the tropical seas, and 

 study the fishes as they swim calmly in the crystalline water, amid the forests of waving 

 seaweeds or branching corals. 



The harmony of the tints is not less remarkable than their brilliancy, for the brightest 

 and most glowing colours are flung boldly together in kaleidoscopic profusion, and in 

 defiance of all the conventional rules by which artists like to govern themselves and others, 

 are so exquisitsly harmonious that not a tint could be altered or removed without destroying 

 the entire chromatic effect. Examples of some of these fish will be given in the course of 

 the succeeding pages, and the reader will see that, even when labouring under the 

 disadvantage of substituting plain black and white for their natural colours, they must be 

 truly the humming-birds of the ocean. 



The GUTTER'S BODIAN is a species spread over the greater part of the Indian seas, and 

 caught, though it appears but rarely, on the coasts of Ceylon, being most frequently 



