SKATE. 447 



feet, or weigh above three pounds ; but it requires seve- 

 ral pairs of sinewy hands to drag fall-grown specimens 

 of the biggest rays to the steelyard, or to force them 

 into the balance, when a counterpoise has often to be 

 effected by a pile of cannon-balls, and the result regis- 

 tered, not in pounds, but in hundredweights. Lastly, 

 lampreys, according to their biographers, are of retiring, 

 cautious, and unsocial habits; while gregarious skate 

 delight in society, and are impetuous and headlong in 

 their passions. Why, then, are creatures thus essentially 

 different in many obvious points of comparison, placed so 

 near in ichthyological works as to be separated only by 

 the thin partition of a page ? Because, while common 

 observers are content in skin-deep knowledge to look 

 superficially, and to note merely palpable distinctions, 

 the practised eye of a systematist penetrates deeper; 

 he cuts through all integumentary impediments, clears 

 away muscle, artery, vein and nerve, as mere encum- 

 brances, and goes direct to the skeleton ; there finds that 

 lampreys and rays, unlike most fish, agree with each 

 other in the common possession of a cartilaginous back, 

 and considers this a sufficient ground for bringing them 

 together. Thus has a single point of physiological re- 

 semblance, and that, too, by no means an essentially 

 characteristic one — ^for cartilage is but the early stage of 

 bone — been held a sufficient reason for upsetting various 

 plain and more striking differences, which might have sug- 

 gested to an unbiassed judgment the propriety of keeping 

 creatures so unlike, apart. But being once united, the 

 irrupta copula of scientific order has bound rays and 

 lampreys so indissolubly together, that there is no hke- 

 lihood now of a separation ; and having travelled for^he 

 last century with a common passport, under the name of 

 Chondropterygians, they will no doubt continue members 

 of the same wwhappy family party to the latest posterity, 

 swimming nose to nose in the same illustrated plate, and 



