BONY FlhUES. 337 



interesting. A pair were kept alive for some time in a glass 

 vessel, and exhibited considerable activity and intelligence. They 

 swam about with an undulating 

 kind of movement, and frequently 

 twined their tails raund the weeds 

 placed in their prison. Their eyes 



The Sea-horee. 



moved independently of each other, 



like those of the chameleon, and the changeable tints of the head 

 closely resemble that animal. More than once, these curious fish 

 have been seen curled up in oyster shells. The singular creaturea 

 called Pipe-fish also belong to the Syngnathidae. 



The Eemora, or Sucking-fish, is remarkable for the pecu- 

 liar apparatus situated on the upper part of its head. By this it 

 can adhere to any object so firmly that it is a difficult matter to 

 make it loose its hold. It is often found adhering to large fish or 

 to the bottoms of ships, probably in both instances for the sake 

 of the fragments of food rejected by the one, or thrown overboard 

 from the other. 



The older writers on Natural History fully believed that 

 one Remora had the power of arresting the swiftest ship in its 

 course, and fixing it firmly in the same spot in spite of spread 

 canvas and swift gales. As the Remora is about the same size as 

 a herring, our ancestors naturally considered this a very curious 

 circumstance, and wrote no few poems on the subject. The fol- 

 lowing true account of this fish is extracted from Macgillivray's 

 Voyage of the Rattlesnake : 



" Small fish appeared to abound at this anchorage (the 

 Calvados group of islands). I had never before seen the Sucking- 

 fish (^Echeneis remora) so plentiful as at that place ; they caused 

 much annoyance to our fishermen by carrying oflF baits and hooks, 

 and appeared always on the alert, darting out in a body of twenty 

 or more from under the ship's bottom when any ofial was thrown 

 overboard. Being quite a nuisance, and useless as food, Jack 

 often treated them as he would a shark, by sprit-sail yarding, or 

 some less refined mode of torture. One day, some of us while 

 walking the poop had our attention directed to a sucking-fish 

 "id w 



