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THE LADIES MAGAZINE OF GARDENING. 
and in their fins, which are much longer and larger in some varieties than 
in others. 
The gold fish was first brought from China to the Cape of Good Hope 
by the Dutch, about 1811; and a few specimens were soon after pur¬ 
chased at an enormous price by the Portuguese, who appear to have first 
brought it to Europe. The Dutch continued for some time to sell their 
fisli at exorbitant prices; but the fish breeding rapidly in Portugal, the 
Dutch soon lost their monopoly, and the Portuguese for many years 
supplied gold and silver fish to the rest of Europe. Even so late as the 
middle of the last century, gold fish were regularly imported from 
Portugal in large earthenware jars, like those now used for grapes. 
Gold fish are said to have been introduced into England in 1691 ; but the 
first account we have of their being kept at any particular place goes no 
farther back than 1728, when the Duke of Argyle had some at Whitton, 
near Isleworth. In France, the first seen are said to have been sent as a 
present to Mademoiselle de Pompadour, about 1730; when the French 
courtiers were so enchanted with the splendour of this new kind of fish, 
that they called it La Dorade de la Chine , a name it still retains through¬ 
out France. The French have, however, now so completely naturalised 
this fish in the Mauritius, that it is served at table with the other kinds 
of carp, which it greatly resembles in taste, though it has a more delicate 
flavour. 
Though the gold fish is a native of a very hot part of China, and 
though it appears to enjoy the heat of a pine-stove or orchideous house in 
England, yet it possesses the power of resisting a great degree of cold. 
Some years since, Professor Host, a well-known naturalist in Vienna, 
chanced to leave a glass globe containing a gold fish in the window of a 
room without a fire, during one of the coldest nights of a very severe 
winter. In the morning he recollected his poor fish, and examining the 
glass, he found the water frozen apparently quite hard, and the fish fixed 
immovably in the centre. Supposing the fish to be dead, he left it in 
the ice; but as it was extremely beautiful, he took a friend to look at it 
in the course of the day, when, to his great surprise, he found that the 
water had thawed naturally, from the room becoming warm by the sun, 
and that the fish was quite lively, and swimming about as though 
nothing had happened. The friend of M. Host was so much struck with 
this remarkable occurrence, that he tried a similar experiment; but 
bringing his frozen fish to the stove to hasten its revival, the fish died. 
Gold fish live a very long time. A few years since there were some 
in a large marble basin belonging to the Alcazar of Seville, which were 
known to have been there more than sixty years, and which are 
