FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 105 



such as to discount anyone's thirst for biological 

 knowledge. Nor does the tarpon differ from the 

 majority of surface-swimming fishes in the rapidity 

 with which it digests its last meal. Of several that 

 I cut open in order to ascertain the contents of the 

 stomach, one only revealed anything, and that was 

 a blue crab, measuring about six inches across the 

 back, and the skeleton of a cow-fish four inches 

 long. As the tarpon that furnished this slender 

 material weighed 55 lbs., it looks (though anything 

 in the nature of deduction from such meagre data is 

 out of the question) as if this fish may, like the 

 herrings of other seas, prey on forms of life very 

 small compared with its own bulk. 



In character, the tarpon displays, like some 

 other large fishes, a curious mixture of foolishness 

 and cunning, of ingenuousness and resource. The 

 guileless impulse with which it takes a strip of fish 

 dangling from a great tinned hook, which the 

 fisherman does not take the smallest pains to con- 

 ceal, can only be explained by its want of education 

 in the angler's ways. We at home are accustomed 

 to the curious familiarity with the wiles of man 

 displayed by the trout that dwell in much-fished 

 waters. Even the salmon, whose way of living 

 takes him during part of the year out into the sea 

 world and beyond reach of nets or hooks, loses 

 familiarity with those engines of destruction, but 

 the old trout of the chalk stream sees, every may- 

 fly season, so many clumsy flies pitched before and 

 behind him that only the artist can compass his 

 fall. 



The tarpon is denied the obvious advantages of 

 so liberal an education. Even off Colon and other 



