FISHES. 
19 
The grave would he abolished ; this gay world, 
A valley of dry bones, a Golgotha, 
In which the living stumbled o’er the dead. 
Till they could fall no more, and blind perdition 
Swept frail mortality away for ever. 
’Twas wisdom, mercy, goodness, that ordain’d 
Life in such infinite profusion, — Death, 
So sure, so prompt, so multiform, to those 
That never sinn’d, that know not guilt, that fear 
No wrath to come, and have no heaven to lose.” ^ 
The voracity of Fishes is very great ; there 
seems no limit to their appetite but the actual 
capacity of their stomach. Mr. Jesse tells of 
a Pike, to which he threw, one after the other, 
five Roach, each about four inches in length. 
He swallowed four of them, and kept the fifth in 
his mouth for about a quarter of aii hour, when 
it also disappeared.'' Digestion, however, is very 
rapid in predatory fishes ; in a few hours not a 
single bone remains in the stomach or intestines 
of a Fish that has been swallowed* Mr. Frazer^ 
in his History of the Salmon/' says, that he 
has found seven small Fishes in a Grilse (or 
young Salmon) ^of three pounds and a-half^ and 
several Herrings in the body of Salmon, and that 
the digestion was so rapid that fire or water could 
not consume them more quickly. A remarkable 
example of the voracity of these animals is men- 
tioned in the following extract from a lecture 
delivered before the Zoological Society of Dublin 
by Dr. Houston. 
This preparation (for the fidelity of which I 
can vouch, as it belongs to the Museum of the 
Royal College of Surgeons, and which may be 
taken as a fair average specimen of a Fish's 
breakfast party, captured at an early hour of the 
* Montgomery’s “ Pelican Island.” 
