A NOTES ON PISH AND FISHING. 



of the natural history of the creatures which are the 

 objects of his sport, as, indeed, should all sportsmen in 

 their several departments, and not pursue their quarry- 

 as mere savages. He will be amply rewarded by his 

 studies, which will show him that fish are really the most 

 interesting of all the great Classes of the animal world, 

 and still present the widest field for observation and 

 investigation. 



I am not, however, about to trouble my readers with 

 any attempt at a learned discussion on ichthyology, or 

 write a criticism on the scientific and unscientific Classifi- 

 cations of fish from the time of Aristotle down to the 

 naturalists of the present day. Let G-esner, Buffon, 

 Linnaeus, Cuvier, Huxley, Owen, and a host of other 

 learned authors be read by angler-naturalists as they 

 have leisure ; but suffice it for our present purpose to say 

 that Fish belong to the great Vertebrate division of the 

 Animal Kingdom as opposed to the Invertebrate, and that 

 they are one of its great Classes, whether we take the 

 Six Classes of Linnaeus, the Mammalia, Birds, Reptiles, 

 Ashes, Insects, and Worms, or the nine or more classes 

 of other naturalists. The Orders and Sub-orders, Families 

 and Sub-families, Sections and Sub-sections, into which 

 fish have been divided and subdivided, are almost as 

 numerous as the Chapters with their Sections and Sub- 

 sections to which Burton, that most wondrous of " book- 

 makers," has treated his readers in his Anatomy of 

 Melancholy. Various too have been the principles on 

 which fish have been divided and subdivided. Professor 

 Owen, I believe, has classified them according to their 

 Bones, or, to speak more scientifically, their "osseous 

 structure ;" while another and most interesting prin- 



