THE ZooLocist—SEPTEeMBER, 1876. 5057 
So far from being the vicious creatures we are led to believe, 
these specimens have become great pets; they readily take food 
from the hand of any one in the habit of feeding them, even 
coming a third of their length ont of the water to take the food. 
There seems little doubt that this famous fish was kept for more 
than mere culinary purposes in ancient times, for we read of their 
being carefully tended, and decked with rings of silver and gold; 
and Porphyrius says that the loss of one of these pets was a 
greater grief to him than the death of his three children. Antonia, 
too, exhibited hers at Bauli, near Naples, in the grounds of 
Drusus, decorated with these rings; while Hortensius the orator 
never quite got over the death of his favourite Murena. There 
seems to have been a time when these animals were as extrava- 
gantly fashionable as some of our modern hobbies. Even sedate 
Cicero says these people “deemed no moment of their lives more 
happy than when these creatures first came to eat out of their 
hands.” This fashion was carried so far that the aristrocratic 
Roman family of Licinii, to express their admiration for this fish, 
took the name of Murena in addition to their own. 
I have already said how gentle and timid, until familiar with | 
those who attend them, are these fish. I have seen no indication 
of their wilfully biting any one, although in one clearly accidental 
case one did bite its feeder, making a slight puncture with the back 
teeth, which caused little or no pain. Amongst other bad habits 
attributed to this handsome animal, is one which I think is doubt- 
lessly as untrue as the others I have stated. I am glad to say it is 
given on the authority of one writer only, Columella, who says it 
has, for a fish, the remarkable phenomenon of a strong tendency 
to hydrophobia and canine madness! Surely these old authors 
must have invented some of the terrible attributes of this fish, to 
act as a check upon the expensive custom of keeping them as 
pets ; no other idea can be suggested as an explanation for such 
extraordinary statements. Even Appian comes forward with a 
wonderful description of a frequent battle which is waged between 
the Murena and the cuttle, in which the former is always 
successful ; but he afterwards more graphically describes a san- 
guinary sea-fight between the victorious Murena and a heavily 
mailed Cancer, in which, this time, the crab gets the better of the 
two, and Murena at last falls ignominiously to his powerful jaws. 
Lastly (though certainly not least), Cesar distributed six thousand 
