2 
INCIDENTS OF THE YOYAGE. 
in his huge unwieldiness, and making ‘‘ the deep to be 
hoary,” was an incident which, though far from new 
to me, was not without interest ; — I looked on the 
vastest of known animals. On another day, when 
about 160 miles S.W. of Madeira, the sailors, with 
a surface line, caught the Bonito,” a beautiful 
pearly fish of the mackarel family, with rainbow 
stripes on the sides. The bait, which proved too 
enticing for him, w^as the same as that with which his 
more familiar, but not less beautiful, cousin is often 
taken, a piece of red rag. The stomach was found 
to be distended with a multitude of small Snipe- 
fishes (Centriscus), all of the same size, about two 
inches and a half long. A living specimen of the 
same Snipe-fish was drawn up on the same day in a 
bucket of water. The Centriscus is described by 
Risso as rarely wandering far from the shore, and as 
delighting in the mud at the bottom of the shoal sea. 
But the facts just mentioned suggest very different 
habits. The Bonito is well known to be a surface 
swimmer ; and his morning’s meal having been ex- 
clusively made of the Centrisci, combines, with the 
living specimen lifted in the bucket, to prove that the 
latter is also a surface-species, while the locality shows 
it to be pelagic. 
In mid-ocean, eleven hundred miles from the 
nearest point of land, a large Turtle, probably of the 
Loggerhead species {Chehne caretta), swimming on 
the surface, was disturbed in his recreation by the 
approach of the ship, and dived with a splash into the 
security of the clear depths below. And as we ap- 
proached the lovely Archipelago, toward which my 
