148 PEOSE HALIETJTICS. 



pugnacious of small fish the gasterostei or sticklebacks, 

 species of all which genera were known to the ancients, 

 while of many exotic and some indigenous subgenera we 

 find no certain accounts in their writings. Amongst the 

 more remarkable of these last may be cited the sebastes, 

 from whose prickly back the Esquimaux derive their 

 primitive needles, the ' not to be trusted apistos/* the 

 peristidions, one of which, P. cataphracta, is occasion- 

 ally sold at Naples under the vernacular name of ' pesce 

 cornutu,' and those rival frights and bugbears the 

 crushed head pelors and synaceans, ' que leur afireuse 

 laideur a fait regarder comme veneneuses par les pe- 

 cheurs des mers des Indes/f Leaving these and others, 

 which are chiefly interesting to the ichthyologists or to 

 the inhabitants of those shores where they occur, we 

 proceed to a brief notice of the Gurnard group. 



Few fish have been so long notorious for making a 

 noise in the world as the triglas ; the Romans used to 

 call them lyres, but whether this name was ironically 

 imposed on account of their most unmusical grunt, or 

 in consequence of some resemblance of their body to the 

 shape of an ancient lyre, seems not quite clearly made 

 out : a much more modern designation for the gurnard 



are particularly fine. The second species of cottus is that bold 

 voracious flalitlie C. scorpius, or father-lasher, of whose flesh little 

 use is made except by the Greenlanders, who also extract oil from 

 ts liver. 



* One of these, Apistos Israelitorum, being the only known 

 flying-fish of the Red Sea, where it is called by the Arabs the 

 sea-looust, is supposed by Ehrenberg, who fell in with it at Tor, 

 to represent the quails on which the Israehtes were miraculously 

 fed in the desert, as if a miracle needed explanation. 



t Cuvier. ' The negroes of the Isle of France, who regard it 

 rather as a reptiLe than a fish, and fear its sting worse than that 

 of a viper or scorpion, call it fi-fi (the hideous) ; in fact, nothing 

 can be imagmed more frightful— one would scarcely call it a fish, 

 but rather a loose mass, an unformed lump of corrupted jelly.' 



