CuaprTer III, 
THE GOLDFISH AND ITS HABITS. 
The goldfish is a product of artificial cultivation; its ances- 
tor is, in the author’s opinion, the Crucian carp (carasstus sinen- 
sis), a native of China, of which the Karausche (Carassius 
vulgaris) of Germany is the European representative. The 
Chinese and other oriental people have cultivated this fish for 
many centuries as an ornament. By selecting specimens having 
accidental peculiarities in their anatomical structure or color, 
so-called “sports”, as breeders, and assisted by the influence of 
climatic changes and different diet, they have gradually pro- 
duced many, more or less fixed, beautiful or odd types of gold- 
fish. 
It is a fact, that if any of the types now under cultivation 
are left to themselves in open waters unprotected, they inva- 
riably and quite soon lose their brilliant colors and peculiar 
shapes and assume the form and modest olivaceous coloring of 
the Crucian carp. 
Some twelve years ago I found in a lot of about one thou- 
sand of such carp, caught in an old out-of-the-way pool on 
Long Island, seventeen specimens, about six inches in length, 
with telescopic eyes. Most of them had but one eye thus 
shaped, but in five both eyes were tclescopic and as large and 
perfectly developed to be a point of excellence to any tele- 
scope fish, When I called the attention of my regular fisher- 
man, a person who could neither read nor write, to these fish, 
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