414 
Pliny's katueal histoey. 
[Book IX. 
says, that the shell-fish which did this service are duly ho- 
noured in the temple of Venus,^ at Cnidos. Trebius Niger 
says that this fish is a foot in length, and that it can retard 
the course of vessels, five fingers in thickness ; besides which, 
it has another peculiar property — when preserved in salt, and 
applied, it is able to draw up gold which has fallen into a well, 
however deep it may happen to be.^* 
CHAP. 42, (26.) FISHES WHICH CHANGE THEIE COLOUE. 
The msena changes its white colour, and in summer be- 
comes swarthy. The phycis^^ also changes its colour, and 
^ Yenus was fabled to have emerged from the sea in a shell. 
9* Rabelais refers to these wonderful stories about the echeneis or remora, 
B. iv. c. 62 : " And indeed, wliy should he have thought this difficult, seeing 
that an echeneis or remora, a silly, weakly fish, in spite of all the 
winds that blow from the thirty-two points of the compass, will in the 
midst of a hurricane make you, the biggest first-rate, remain stock still, as 
if she were becalmed, or the blustering tribe had blown their last ; nay, 
and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out 
of the deepest well that ever was sounded with a plummet ; for it will 
certainly draw up the precious metal." 
Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 34; ^lian, Hist. Anim. B. xii. c. 
48. Eondelet is of opinion that this meena was the fish still called menola 
by the people of Liguria and Rome. It was a fish little valued, and we 
find it called by Martial, ''inutilis msena,'^ B, xii. Epigr. 30. Cuvier 
says, that if it does not change from white to black, as Pliny states, its 
colours are much more lively in the spring. It also has an ofl'ensive smell 
at certain times, as is noticed by Aristotle, Hist. Anim, B. viii. c. 30, and 
to which Martial alludes in the above epigram. Ovid also mentions it as 
a fish of no value ; held, in all probability, in the same degree of estimation 
as a sprat with us. It is, no doubt, the Spams msena of Linnasus. 
11 We learn from Aristotle, B. viii. c. 30, that the phycis was a whitish 
fish, which in the spring assumed a variegated colour. In an Epigram of 
ApoUonides it is called "red;" and Speusippus, as quoted in Athenseus, 
B. v., says that it is similar to the perch and the channe. Ovid speaks of 
it as frequenting the shore, and Oppian represents it as dwelling among 
the sea- weed on the rocks. It also lived on shrimps, and its flesh was 
light and wholesome ; while its most singular property was that of making 
its nest among the fucus or sea- weed, whence its name. All these charac- 
teristics, Cuvier says, are to be found, from what Olivi states, in the "^o" of 
the Venetians, found in the Adriatic, the Gobius of LinutTus ; the male of 
which in the spring makes a nest of the roots of the zostera in the mud, 
in which the female lays her eggs, which are fecundated by itself, and 
then protected by it against the attacks of enemies. This is probably tlie 
fish that is alluded to by Ovid, Halieut. 1. 121, ''The fish that imitates, 
beneath the waves, the pretty nests of the birds." 
i 
