12 
CARP. 
danger, as in submitting to become tame and familiar wben 
it is safe to be so. Thus sings the poem of the anglers: — 
Fish have their various characters as.sign’d, 
Not more W form and colour than by mind. 
The wai’y 'Trout but few temptations hit; 
The Perch an idiot, and the Cai’p a wit. 
and another writer informs us, as quoted by Daniel in his 
“Rural Sports,” — 
Of all the fish that swim the watery mead, 
Not one in cunning can the Carp exceed; 
which latter portion of its character is displayed in that, when 
encircled by a net, if no crevice can be found through which 
to pass, it will lower itself into some channel which it forms 
in the bottom, that the net may pass over it; or if that 
cannot be, then it throws itself over the head-rope, much in 
the same manner as the Grey Mullet in like circumstances. 
And again: — 
Learn what of late my wond’ring eyes beheld 
Near the green margin of the war-famed Scheld; 
Thick with enormous Carp, I saw them roll, 
Called by a practised brother of the cowl. 
His well-known whistle they obeyed, they sped. 
In wallowing heaps and hope the promised bread. 
Carp shouldering Carp, th’ injected morsel snap: — 
And the intelligence thus ascribed to this fish is borne out by 
the great development of the brain, in connection also with 
peculiarities in the structure of the organs of perception. 
According to Professor Owen, the average proportion of the 
size of the brain to that of the body in fishes is one in three 
thousand; but in the Carp, according to Blumenbach, it amounts 
to one in five hundred; which is the same as is found in “half- 
reasoning” elephant; this exti'aordinary development in the Carp 
existing also in the portion of that centre of intelligence termed 
the prosencephalon, or which most nearly answers to the 
cerebrum or seat of understanding in the higher animals. And 
although the bulk of the brain taken alone may not afford 
a just criterion of the amount of understanding in any creature, 
since it is known that in the proportion as the nerves of sense 
are large compared with the brain, the particular feeling to 
