NATURAL HISTORY IN ANECDOTE. 

 VERTEBRATA. 



CLASS V— PISCES. 



Fishes. We now come to the fifth and last class of the 

 Vertebrata, a class so large that it is impossible to deal ade- 

 quately with it in a single volume of ordinary size, much less 

 in a single section of one treating of the whole of the verte- 

 brates. There are said to be 10,000 species, so that a book 

 which devoted one page to each would make an enormous vol- 

 ume. All that can be done here is to deal with a few of the 

 better known species, as far as possible selecting types of orders 

 without attempting to follow closely any classification. Giinther 

 divides the Fishes into six sub-classes, which are further ar- 

 ranged in thirteen orders. The first of these orders includes 

 the Sticklebacks, the Perches, the Mullets, the Gurnards, the 

 Mackerel and the Swordfish besides others. Of these we can 

 deal with but two or three. 



The The Stickleback is associated with the earliest 



Sticklebacks, efforts of the youthful angler, and most of us can 

 remember capturing specimens of some fresh-water variety, in 

 the days of childhood, and carrying them home in triumph in 

 a bottle. There are a number of species of the stickleback, 

 some living in fresh water and some being marine. They are 

 extremely voracious and it is a good job for a large number of 

 other living things that they are no bigger than they are. They 

 are also very pugnacious and fight among themselves with great 

 determination. The Stickleback is about an inch and a half 



354 



Digitized by Microsoft® 



