SEA FKOa. 251 



Nor are colour and shining scales the only attractions 

 these creatures can boast : their figure also is generally 

 graceful, and suggestive of agile and rapid movement ; 

 while other kinds that are deficient in this so usual ele- 

 gance of shape, often please from some peculiar quaint- 

 ness of contour, or from some evident adaptation of their 

 organization to meet a particular exigency. Even the 

 repugnance excited by the shark does not proceed from 

 his personal, but moral deformity; not because he is 

 ugly to look at, but an ugly customer to have to do with. 

 As every rule, however, has its exception, so are Sea- 

 frogs the exception to that of the prepossessing appear- 

 ance of fish in general, and Nature, elsewhere lavish of 

 beauty and grace, has bestowed upon them nothing but 

 deformity and disgrace; they are the bugbears and 

 scape-goats of the deep, from which most monsters, the 

 terror of young and the delight of grown-up children, 

 have been constructed. No one could doubt the pater- 

 nity of those open-mouthed chimeras of national nur- 

 series — the Old Bones, Spring Devils, Befanos, Croc- 

 Mitaines, Bric-&,-Bracs, etc. — who had seen a sea-frog 

 as prepared by the Neapolitan boatmen for a show, the 

 inside thoroughly cleared out and eviscerated, with the 

 mouth set wide open, and a lantern in the interior, 

 shining through the pellucid skin : all these are in fact 

 but tame copies of this incarnate fright. From the 

 same fertile source also painters and poets famed for 

 their grotesque or horrific representations — ^the Ariostos 

 and the Brughels — have largely, though it may be at the 

 moment unwittingly, drawn. Too ugly for any associ- 

 ate, and claiming no natural kin with any, the lopheus 

 swims about in bloated self-suf&ciency, alone, without 

 congener or any one legitimate family tie ; whoUy un- 

 like in person, except in possessing a cartilaginous skele- 

 ton, any other member of the Chondropterygian group ; 

 the female moreover, as Aristotle has well observed, does 



