50 
KAINBOW WRASS. 
experience severe pains in the bowels. Swimmers and divers 
are much molested by this fish, in the same manner as flesh- 
flies assail and bite them; and Oppian compares the effect to 
the sting of a nettle. These divers are compelled to drive 
the fishes away, to avoid being tormented with their bite; and 
so persevering is the annoyance, that the men are obliged for 
the time to give up following their occupations. 
However foreign to truth this account, and especially the 
first portion of it, may appear to us, we should call to mind, 
in vindication of the writer, that he reports no more than the 
current opinion of his day, and that the particulars themselves 
were in close connection with the theories then predominant. 
It was long held as a principle in natural philosophy, that the 
sea contained something in every instance that bore an analogy 
to what was in the sky above, or on the land; and the 
attention of the philosopher was directed to the discovery of 
such objects as were thus believed to carry out these corres- 
pondences of nature. Many figures, with a little violence done 
to the likeness, are in this light handed doAvn to us by writers 
of the middle ages, who had not yet escaped from the trammels 
thrown around them by the ancients; and it was with these 
impressions that they imposed a name upon a fish because 
they supposed it to be endued with some of the ill qualities 
which belonged to an insect with which they were acquainted. 
Ihe Creeping Julus was said to convey a poisonous bite; and 
that the fish Julis will annoy and bite we have the authority 
of no less an observer than Rondeletius, who describes what 
happened to himself, as well as on another occasion to a friend. 
When on one occasion he went to bathe near Antipolis, he 
saw several of these small fishes hasting towards him, and they 
attacked with their bites not only his legs, but the hard 
portions of his heels; and a similar circumstance was related 
to him by some gentlemen, as happening to them near Nice. 
No injurious effect followed to this eminent naturalist; but it 
is highly probable that the terror which would arise to an 
ordinary person from the prospect of danger, would confirm the 
impiession that the danger itself was not wholly imaginary. 
There is reason to believe that these fish are usually in com- 
panies. 'iheir food and season of spawning are for the most 
part the same as in other kinds of AVh-asses; but they are little 
