CUVIER'S BODIAN. 



237 



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

 same color 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 colored species for which the warmer seas are so famous, and whose 

 vivid coloring and striking forms put to shame the comparatively sober inhabitants of 

 the northern waters. 



\Yhat connection there may be between colors and caloric is one of the unsolved 

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

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



CUVIER'S BODlAN.-P/fltframma Hneatum. 



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

 yond all power of description, and the most glowing colors 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 

 colors are arranged are as unexpected as they are effective, and the art student would 

 gain no slight knowledge of that most difficult science of color, 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 colors 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 exquisitely harmonious that not a tint could be altered or removed with- 

 out 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 

 laboring under the disadvantage of substituting plain black and white for their natural 

 colors, they must be truly the humming-birds of the ocean. 



The CUVIER'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 



