146 
ARCTIC CHIMjERA. 
familiar name, the Rabbit Fish, that is chiefly known within 
the icy waters of our northern circle of the world, and from 
which it seldom wanders; so that its occurrence in the most 
distant, in that direction, of the British Islands, is rare and 
accidental; and consequently its scientific observers have been 
few. Indeed, within its native seas it is said to come near 
the surface only in the dark hours of the night, and therefore 
it can only be by rare good fortune that its living manners 
shall fall under the inspection of any one. For these reasons 
we find ourselves compelled to lie under an obligation to two 
or three of the students of nature for what we have to say 
of this curious fish, as regards cither its form or habits; and 
of these we shall assign the preference to the French naturalist 
Lacepede, which we do principally from the consideration 
that he appears more than others to have observed and studied 
it in its living condition. We have figures which probably 
are correct on the whole in the works of Bloch and Dono- 
van; but the colours are perhaps a little exaggerated, for 
Gesner informs us that the drawing he had received from a 
friend, and which formed the first announcement of this fish 
to the world, was simply of a greenish tint. The figure by 
Lacepede, which I copy, appears to answer more closely to 
his description than either of the others above mentioned, and 
it also more emphatically bears out the fanciful similitude of 
the fabulous Chimsera of the ancient Greeks, from which 
Linnseus derived its scientific name. 
According to the French author above referred to, the 
activity, in connection with the grotesqueness of the movements 
of this fish, the flexibility of its very long and slender tad, its 
manner of uncovering its teeth, and continually twisting about 
the different portions of its flexible muzzle, forcibly call up 
in the spectator’s mind the grinning and absurd actions of the 
monkey; while the singular form of its body, its long tail, 
(much like that of a snake,) joined to a massy head which 
resembles that of a lion, with the long first rays of its dorsal 
fin representing in some sort the mane of that beast; to which 
we add in the male a small elevated horn on the fore part 
of the head, that is crested with a tuft of slender threads, 
which may be supposed to represent the crown of the king of 
beasts. The lineaments of the other parts of the body at 
