BEAUTIFUL SHELL-FISH. 237 
When dried it resembles whalebone, and makes a very nice coach 
whip. Our bone fish are very similar in flavor and appearance 
to the northern shad.” 
Mr. Sargeant states, that the dolphin, king fish, Spanish 
mackerel, bonita and rock fish weigh from fifty to one hun- 
dred pounds, and that the jew fish often weighs six hundred 
pounds. Among the remaining Bahama fish, he mentions the 
margate, cat, king, Hamlet, Miss Nix, grunt, runner, yellow tail, 
snapper, stripped snapper, gray snapper, pork, soldier, jack, 
goggle-eyed, cockeye, pilot, mullet, plate, grouper, shad, goat, 
trumpeter, sunset, porgy, sailor’s choice, sand porpoise, balahoo, 
and crawfish or lobster. 
The shell-fish found in the Bahama waters harmonize perfect- 
ly with the element in which they live, and with all the varied 
forms of vegetable and animal life with which they are surrounded. 
Exquisitely beautiful are they all. There is no shock to the most 
delicate and refined taste in passing from corals and corallines to 
the fish that live and sport in the stony submarine bowers and 
grottoes,—and from gorgonias and algae to mollusks—all are 
‘wonderfully beautiful in form and color, and live in water that 
pleases by its warmth, and charms by the sparkling brilliancy of 
itshues. These combined, constitute exquisitely pictured leaves 
of a most captivating chapter in the book of nature which God 
himself has illustrated. The perfection of the work will not 
surprise us if we reflect that the Artist.is divine. It has been 
estimated that there are not less than four thousand different 
species of shell-fish in the waters of the Bahamas, and Mr. Phelps 
claims to have collected of the shells nearly one thousand. The 
shores abound with them, and they seem in many places almost 
as numerous as pebbles. We were astonished to find how large 
a number of handsome specimens we were able to collect within 
a small circle almost anywhere upon the shore without changing 
