THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 151 



be wortli while to give a few hints as to what might 

 be done, by any one whose curiosity has been excited 

 by the salt-water tanks of the Zoological Gardens. 



An hour or two's dredging round the rocks to the 

 eastward, would probably yield many delicate and 

 brilliant little fishes ; Gobies, brilliant Labri, blue, 

 yellow, and orange, with tiny rabbit mouths, and 

 powerful protruding teeth; pipe fishes (Syngnathi)* 

 with strange snipe-bills (which they cannot open) 

 and snake-like bodies ; small cuttle-fish (Sepiolse) 

 of a white jelly mottled with brilliant metallic hues, 

 with a ring of suckered arms round their tiny parrots' 

 beaks, who, put into a jar, will hover and dart in the 

 water, as the sky-lark does in air, by rapid winnow- 

 ings of their glassy side-fins, while they watch you 

 with bright lizard-eyes ; the whole animal being a 

 combination of the vertebrate and the mollusc, so 

 utterly fantastic and abnormal, that (had not the 

 family been among the commonest, from the earliest 

 geological epochs) it would have seemed to man's de- 

 ductive intellect, a form almost as impossible as the 



* Plate XI. Fig. 1. 



