29 
PATTERNS ON LIVING ANIMALS. 
Early in the spring of 1893, the Marquis of 
Hamilton brought with him from Trinidad a number 
of little fish, less in size than a half-grown minnow, 
which were presented to the Zoological Society, and 
were to be seen at Easter swimming in a glass bowl, 
among a thin growth of water weeds, in the warm 
chamber in which the tropical moths and butterflies 
are hatched. 
Being small and elegant, they have a long and ugly 
scientific name, the Girardinus Guppyi. In the 
absence of a label, the writer mistook them for the 
gudgeon, which form the food of the more rapacious 
fishes, and was about to suggest that they would be 
interesting material for an experiment with the electric 
eels, when a ray of sunlight flashing through the 
bowl revealed the astonishing fact that these tiny 
fishes possessed beauties of ornament not exceeded 
in kind by any of the most exquisite birds of the 
tropics. 
Each of the little creatures, though so frail and so 
