300 ON POISONOUS FISHES AND FISH-POISONS. 



fishes. As you approach the great submarine plateau, the odour of the 

 siirne, and of the spermatic substances that find a nestling-place in the 

 crevices and shallow pools spread through it, is very remarkable. You 

 approach it from the east, and find the cheering blandness of the sea-breeze 

 suddenly changing to the nauseating smell of a fish-market. Those who 

 have waded on to our shore-reefs, know not only the strong scent given out 

 by the polyps that build there, but feel how sensibly the hands are affected, 

 and the skin of the thighs are susceptible of a stinging influence from the 

 slightest contact with the slime of corals. (Vide Gosse's ' Naturalist's 

 Sojourn in Jamaica,' page 54.) It has been found by invariable experience 

 that all the fishes taken on the Formigas are pernicious ; that the barra- 

 coutas especially are always poisonous, at least in those months when the 

 Formigas may be sailed over in unbroken water. Similar stretches of 

 shoals among the Bahamas produce fishes similarly deleterious as food. 

 The low-spreading ledges and banks of the Virgin Islands, called the 

 Anegadas, or the Drowned Islands, afford a similar unfavourable ground for 

 fishing. In this way we may account for the remark of Dr Grainger, that 

 fishes are poisonous at one end of St Christopher's, while they are harmless 

 at another. The deep water shoals are not the resort of the star-fish, nor of 

 any of the Echinodermata. They are, therefore, exempt from their evil 

 influences. I do not know whether it be a fact consistent with experience, 

 but fishes of the deep water fish-pot ought always to be safe eating. 



We get over, by these several incidents of our fishing-grounds, the 

 adventitious occurrence of poisonous among wholesome fishes. Some have 

 a natural pernicious character, but others become deleterious from the food 

 on which they subsist at certain seasons on certain banks and coasts. Our 

 ensuing observations will be directed to the sanies indicating disorder in 

 the living tissues of some fishes, and to the poisonous putrefaction or 

 chemical process known to take place in others after they have been a few 

 hours out of water. 



There may be such a change effected by mere condition of the living 

 tissues in animals, at certain times, as that indicated by the conversion of 

 flesh into adipocere. After lying in water, meat begins to undergo the 

 adipocerous putrefaction, or the conversion of flesh into a substance resem- 

 bling the waxen fat of spermaceti. In the course of these changes a 

 poisonous principle develops itself* If over-driven cattle, killed before 

 they are allowed to recover from fatigue, will produce malignant dysentery, 

 what difficulty can there be in accounting for conditions of life which may 

 become poisonous to those who eat of what is not ordinarily deleterious 1 

 No chemical analysis can disclose a state in which there is nothing new or 

 extraneous superadded — only a peculiar condition, and relation of the ordi- 

 nary constituents, superinduced. Kreatine, which is found in the flesh of 

 fishes, is a crystalline substance. It never occurs in organised bodies, but 

 as the result of some abnormal process. The minutest particles of matter 



* Christison on Poisons, in the London Medical Repository, ed. 1835. 



