ON ICHTHYOLOGY IN GENERAL. 3 
view of tlie subject.) Now, fish don’t lend themselves 
to this kind of thing ; if yon want to see them to 
advantage you must study them while they are fresh, 
or if possible alive, or, best of all, in their natural 
element. 
You can certainly preserve specimens in bottles of 
spirits, but they do not retain their beauty in this 
way, and except in a public museum for reference 
and comparison, such specimens have no interest. 
Thus the ichthyologist has no trophies to gloat over ; 
“nothing to show” for all his trouble and investi- 
gations. 
Another thing that may at the outset serve to deter 
people from studying the natural history of fishes, 
is the formidable appearance of the nomenclature, and 
the amount of scientific and anatomical terms that 
abound in all books on this subject. 
Few attempts have as yet been made to popu- 
larise the subject, and as yet, it may be said, the 
subject is comparatively a new one; the great ob- 
ject hitherto has been to collect facts, to find out 
new species, to compare them one with another, and 
to collect them into natural groups according to their 
affinities ; in short, to classify them. 
For this kind of work the utmost accuracy is 
necessary; a rough description of a fish, such as 
would convey some idea of what it was like to a per- 
son who had not studied the subject, would be per- 
fectly useless for purposes of classification, as it 
would probably omit the very points which it would 
b 2 
