IV 
PREFACE. 
attempts, I was obliged to relinquish my design. In a hot climate, the 
colours of fish are more rapidly fugitive after death than in serpents. 
They escape while the painter is adjusting his palette; and in the fine 
gradations from the most brilliant to the softer evanescent tints, nature, 
through boundless variety, ever maintains a certain harmony and cha¬ 
racteristic simplicity in her transitions, that required a delicate pencil 
under more masterly guidance than my artist had pretensions to. 
I the rather mention this circumstance for its having led to an exube¬ 
rance in description which might have otherwise been spared. Yet over 
minute as I thought I had been in point of colour, it was found upon 
trial by more than one artist in London, that insuperable obstacles arose 
to colouring the Drawings from my descriptions. 
From a graduated scale of colours marked by figures, the tints selected 
by myself were marked by correspondent figures on the Drawings, and 
the written description laid before the painter at the same time. In the 
returned Drawings the predominant colours were found tolerably exact; 
but numerous interstices remained blank, which neither the description 
nor my recollection could supply: if filled up at all, it must have been 
merely by conjecture. 
I am inclined therefore to think that drawings of fish can only be 
properly coloured from recent subjects; and that in proportion as fancy 
and conjecture are admitted, or recollection at any distance of time relied 
on, coloured drawings descend below verbal descriptions. 
Language affords definite terms for the prime colours, and many of their 
shades: and by leaving those interstitial gradations blank which the 
pencil only can express adequately, the eye is less liable to be misled 
than when attracted by glaring colours, obtruded sometimes contrary to 
truth, and often at variance with the harmonious simplicity of nature. 
The force of this remark will be felt more sensibly on a comparison of 
some of the plain engravings in Valentine’s History of Amboina,* with 
the illuminated figures of the same fishes in Renard.4- 
* Francis Valentine, a Dutch clergyman at Amboina, Banda, See. in his history of those countries, published in Dutch, 
in 1726, has given engraved figures, together with short descriptions, of about four hundred and sixty fishes. But in 
both, the essential characters have been so little attended to, and the caprice of the painter exercised with such uncon¬ 
trolled licence, that little beyond conjectural information can be derived from most of them. 
