382 
pliny's natueal histoet. 
[Book IX. 
that are covered with crusts ; the kinds of which are thirty 
in number. We shall, on another occasion/^ speak of each 
individually ; but, for the present, we shall treat only of the 
nature of the more remarkable ones. 
CHAP. 17. (15.) — ^WHICH OF THE FISHES ARE OE TH:E LARGEST SIZE. 
Tunnies are among the most remarkable for their size j we 
have fbund one weighing as much as fifteen^^ talents, the 
breadth of its tail being five cubits and a palm.^^ In some of 
the rivers, also, there are fish of no less size, such, for instance, 
as the silurus^^ of the 'Nile, the isox^ of the Ehenus, and the 
cause in B. xxxii. c. 51, Pliny speaks of 174 different kinds of fishes, and 
here he says that the Crustacea are thirty in number. Daubenton speaks 
of the species of fishes as being 866 in number, Avhile Lacepede says that 
he had examined more than a thousand, but that was far below the real 
number. Cuvier mentions specimens of about 6000 kinds of fishes, in the 
Cabinet du Roi. Ajasson remarks upon the learned investigations of 
Cuvier on this subject, and his researches in Sumatra, Java, Kamschatka, 
]^w Zealand, New Guinea, and elsewhere, for the purpose of increasing 
the list of the known kinds of fishes. 
19 B. XXX. c. 53. 
2^ About 1200 pounds. Cetti, in his Natural History of Sardinia," vol. 
iii. p. 134, says that tunnies weighing a thousand pounds are far from un- 
common, and that they have been taken weighing as much as 1800 pounds. 
21 The same as the Latin "dodrans," or about nine inches. This pas- 
sage is taken almost verbatim from Aristotle, Hist. Anim. c. 34. Cuvier 
says that this passage, although like the preceding one, taken from Aris- 
totle, is much more incredible, (though Lacepede, by the way, disputes 
Pliny's statement as to the weight of the tunny). A distance," Cuvier 
says, "of from seven to eight feet from one point of the fork of the tail 
to the other, would denote a fish twenty-five feet in length ; and it must be 
observed, that most of the MSS. of Pliny say two cubits." Aristotle, how- 
ever, beyond a doubt says Jive. 
'■^2 Now universally recognized as the sly silurus, or sheat-fish, called in 
the United States the horn-pout, the Silurus glanis of Linnaeus. On this 
formerly much-discussed question, Cuvier has an interesting Note. " There 
can now be no longer any doubt as to the silurus ; it is evidently synony- 
mous with the 'glanis ' of Aristotle ; as we find Pliny, in c. 17 and 51, 
giving the same characteristics of the silurus, as Aristotle does of the 
glanis, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 20, and B. ix. c. 37 ; such, for instance, as 
the care it takes of its young, and the effects produced upon it by the dog- 
fish and the approach of storms. It is easy to prove also that it is not 
the sturgeon, [as Hardouin thought it to be], but the fish that is still called 
'silurus' by the naturalists, the 'wels'or 'schaid' of the Germans, the 
*saluth' of the Swiss, &c." 
'^^ Cuvier remarks, that it is by no means clear what fish is meant by 
