The Fish World at Home. 223 



THE FISH WORLD AT HOME.* 



Except as a race of creatures which, supply a peculiar kind of 

 food, the fish world is less popularly known than any other 

 conspicuous division of the animal kingdom. Indeed, unless 

 we consider it in a culinary sense, it is easier to like anything 

 better than a fish ; for although the forms of many species are 

 strange and wonderful, though they are decorated with colours 

 as varied and as brilliant as those of birds, the great difficulty 

 of studying their habits diminishes the interest which their 

 peculiar or splendid appearance might otherwise induce us to 

 feel. Our affection for animals is strongly influenced by their 

 agreeableness or unpleasantness to the sense of touch; and 

 even when prudence forbids such tactile experiments, we look 

 at the lion or bear as creatures we should have no objection to 

 fondle, if their moral character was of a more amiable kind. 

 When we pass from the warm-blooded mammalia to the im- 

 portant group of reptiles, we are conscious of a great diminu- 

 tion of sympathy, and though a few people make pets of 

 snakes and tortoises, while some of the graceful lizards of warm 

 countries are welcomed in the domestic circle, there is on the 

 whole too great a gulf between the human and the reptile 

 life for us to enter readily into their mode of being. This dis- 

 crepancy becomes still more striking when we descend to the 

 fish, the inhabitants of an alien element, and the dwellers 

 under conditions by no means easy for us to ascertain. It is 

 true that from an early antiquity men have half domesticated 

 certain kinds in ponds, and before the aquarium assumed its 

 present elegant and instructive shape, many generations had 

 seen gold and silver fish swimming round the old-fashioned 

 globes, with a monotony of motion only varied by the occa- 

 sional occurrence of illness or death. But these experiments 

 and observations added very little to our substantial knowledge 

 of fishy life, and when the naturalist obtained his specimens, 

 he usually studied them as dead organisms and not as fellow- 

 inhabitants of this living world. These causes may tend to 

 make icthyology less often a favourite study than other 

 branches of natural history, but very little attention is required 

 to invest it with an interest of its own. Regarded geologically, 

 the fish present us with the oldest distinctly known group of 

 vertebrate animals. Older, or as old, may have existed; but 

 if land vertebrata should be proved to have been contempora- 

 ries with the earliest fish, the latter would still appear to have 



* A History of Fishes of the British Islands. By Jonathan Couch, F.E.S. 

 Vol. i., containing fifty-seven coloured plates from drawings by the Author 

 Groombridge and Sons, 1862. 



