The Flying Scorpion. 
435 
THE FLYING SCORPION. 
How admirable is Nature ! how extensive her power 
and how various the forms with which she has sur- 
rounded the united elements of animated matter ! From 
the uncouth shape of the wallowing whale, of the un- 
wieldy hippopotamus, or ponderous elephant, to the 
light and elegant form of the painted moth or fluttering 
humming-bird, she seems to have exhausted all ideas, all 
conceptions, and not to have left a single figure untried. 
The fish represented above is one of those, in the out- 
lines and decorations of which appear the discordant 
qualities of frightfulness and beauty. Armed cap-a-pie, 
surrounded with spines and thorns bristling on his 
back, and fins like an armed phalanx of lance-bearers, 
and decorated on the body with yellow ribands, inter- 
woven with white fillets, and on the purple fins of 
his breast with the milky dots of the pintado, the Sea 
Scorpion presents a very extraordinary contrast. His 
eyes, like those of which poets sang when celebrating 
the Nereids and Naiads, consist of black pupils, sur- 
rounded with a silver iris, radiated with alternate 
divisions of blue and black. The rays of the dorsal fin 
are spiny, spotted brown and yellow, conjoined below 
by a dark brown membrane, and separate above; the 
ventral fins are violet with white drops, and the tail 
and anal fins are a sort of tesselated work of blue, 
black, and white, united with the greatest symmetry, 
