TORPEDO. 
213 
with a spear or stick, can benumb the strongest 
arm, and stop the swiftest foot. Oppian goes still 
further, and, with that license to which poets always 
think themselves entitled, makes it strike the fish- 
erman through the whole length of his line and rod. 
Dr. Shaw has inserted the following elegant trans- 
lation of the passage in his General Zoology : 
The hook’d torpedo, with instinctive force. 
Calls all his magic from its secret source : 
Quick thro’ the slender line and polish’d wand 
It darts 5 and tingles in th’ offending hand. 
The palsied fisherman, in dumb surprise. 
Feels thro’ his frame the chilling vapours rise; 
Drops the lost rod, and seems in stiff’ning pain. 
Some frost-fix’d wanderer on the polar plain. 
The torpedo is said to be found of a larger size in 
the Mediterranean than elsewhere. It will live four- 
and-twenty hours out of the sea, and exert its 
power, though in a fainter degree, till the last. It 
frequently buries itself in the sand, where it gives 
a very forcible shock, and often throws down the 
astonished passenger who inadvertently treads upon 
it. Mr. Pennant describes a small one about eighteen 
inches long, which was taken on our coast : the 
head and body, which were indistinct, were nearly 
round, about two inches thick in the middle, at- 
tenuating to extreme thinness on the edges ; the 
ventral fins formed on each side a quarter of a circle ; 
the tail was six inches long, and the two dorsal fins 
were placed near its origin ; its two small eyes were 
placed near each other, and behind each of them was 
