ART. VII.-An Introduction to the Study of Fishes. By Albert C. L. G. Günther, M.A., M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S. Keeper of the Zoological Department in the British Museum. Edinburgh,

1880.

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CHTHYOLOGY can perhaps never become a very popular study, in the way that Entomology, Conchology, or Ornithology, are popular, intense as is the interest it excites in its true votaries, and wonderful as are some of the results of their investigations. The animals of which the science treats are such as do not readily appeal to our sympathies. Fishes live so much out of our sight that, to most of us, the remainder of the proverbial saying naturally follows, and they virtually put themselves out of our mind. To few persons' is given the imagination or the intelligence to supply the gaps which even the most attentive observers cannot fail to find. We may walk day after day beside a ditch, brook, or river, which we know to abound in some kind of piscine life, and yet obtain nothing more than an occasional glimpse of the finny folk that people its waters. At times we detect a dusky form that glides like a shadow across from bank to bank; or, shooting past us, vanishes still more rapidly at our approach. If we pause and, with hesitating step and slow,' creep nearer to the brink, stopping there in hope to see more of the unseen world beneath us, we shall generally be disappointed. Perhaps a silvery flash is flung into the air, but the action is so instantaneous, that in most cases we miss the sight, and hear only the splash caused by the leaping fish, as it momentarily changes its element. Thus it is our ears, rather than our eyes, that tell us of the movements we fain would observe. By the sea, or on it, there is still less to attract our attention to the scaly inhabitants of its deeps or shallows, and we may watch and watch, hour after hour, without perceiving the slightest indication of their having a living tenant. But it may be objected, to what end has the Aquarium, of which so much was expected, been invented, if in it we cannot keep fishes as long as we like and observe their ways? The answer is not very encouraging. It is true that the possession of a glass-tank, filled with salt-water or fresh, and stocked with as many animals as can therein maintain a healthy existence, affords much delight to a considerable number of persons, some of whom may take more than the cursory interest in its inhabitants that was evinced by Mr. Pepys, who records in his diary under date of the 28th of May, 1665,- Thence to see my Lady Pen, where my wife and I were shewn a fine rarity; of Vol. 153.-No. 305.

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fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so for ever [!]; and finely marked they are; being foreign.' Pleasure, no doubt, is given to many more people by contemplating those captive denizens of the vast crystal cisterns which are the pride of the enterprising gentlemen who manage the numerous public exhibitions called by the pseudo-Latin name of Aquarium, in various parts of this country, to say nothing of those on the Continent, from Hamburg to Naples. In all of them the visitor has ample opportunity of admiring the delicate or brilliant hues-sometimes so softly blended, sometimes so vividly contrasted, but always disposed in the way whereby Nature puts Art to the blush-that are displayed by the gurnard, the mackerel, and the wrasse, among marine fishes, or the trout, the stickleback, and the perch, among freshwater species. He may be amused to mark the varied styles of motion, respectively characteristic of the tope, the sole, and the pipe-fish, the eel, the pike, and the tench-all so easy, all so graceful, and all so different. Less engaging, perhaps, yet strangely attractive, it must be confessed, is the cold, vacant, and unimpassioned expression of countenance, presented by fishes with scarcely an exception. The merely mechanical opening and closing of the often lipless jaws, the unmeaning turn of the nearly always lidless eyes, convey to the looker-on no more notion of piscine intelligence, than do the tremulous, albeit truly-timed featherings of the lateral fins, or the undulatory quivering of those that are vertical. Not love, not hate, not anger, not fear, betrays its presence by the least change in the immovable features of the fish's face. The strongest emotions by which the animal may be possessed only affect, and this in comparatively few species, the other parts of its body, and thus, though the visitor should watch for hours, he might still be fitly addressed-' (wòv opậs où (wýv.' Hitherto little or nothing has been attained by means of the Aquarium to promote a real knowledge of ichthyology, whatever it may have done to aid the study of the lower forms of aquatic animals. Even so simple a question as whether fishes sleep or not can scarcely be said to have been solved, as one would expect it might have been, by observations made through the walls of a transparent tank.

Next there is the unquestionable fact that, to pursue any branch of Natural History successfully or satisfactorily, we must have at hand a collection of the objects we study. It is equally undeniable, that hitherto it has been found almost impossible by any known means to preserve a collection of fishes in such a way that the specimens may present an appearance which is not the reverse of agreeable to the spectator. Everybody knows the

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look of the giant pike or trout that, having been subjected to the manipulation of the neighbouring 'naturalist' (as he calls himself), stands in the hall or the lobby of the ordinary country house the goggle eyes, the painted fins, the varnished scales of the monster, stuffed to bursting, bedecked with catstail bulrushes or feathery reed-top primly arranged after the fashion of a Dutch garden, and stiffly extended in a glass coffin-the whole affair as unlike anything that exists in nature as well can be. And yet such preparations, from their frequency, seem to afford some measure of delight to their possessors, especially if they be keen fishermen.* Things are not much bettered when, by a more scientific squire, the fish is placed in a bottle of spirit, according to the mode common in museums. It then rests vertically either on its head or its tail-either of them of course an impossible attitude-its proper colours absolutely gone, or obscured by the preserving liquid, which, without more care and cost than the resources of most collectors can afford, quickly becomes stained till it assumes the hue of the best and oldest sherry in the squire's cellar. Compared with a collection, or even a few specimens, of birds, shells, or insects, wherein each example retains more or less of its original beauty, such a collection of fishes is to the general eye one of the most unpleasing and repugnant spectacles. There is nothing to suggest the limpid water, or the lissom form that once glided through it at a speed only surpassed by a bird on the wing-here poising itself over a shallow paved with many-coloured pebbles, or a reef studded with gorgeously-tinted corallines and there seeking refuge amid the swaying shelter of sea-weed fronds or floating lily-leaves.

On the other hand, it is needless to expatiate on the interest taken from the earliest times in fishing. A vast gulf separates the artists of Egypt and Assyria, who have left us mural representations of the fishes of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, from the author of the 'Halieutics,' and a gap only less wide divides Oppian from the unknown author or authoress who profited by the newly-invented art of printing to present to 'gentyll and noble men the Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle.' Thenceforward to our own time works on the subject

*The practice of taking casts of fishes answers well in some cases, especially when the subjects are of large size; but to be at all successful the services of a painter such as Mr. Rolfe must be secured, and his art might just as well, if not better, be applied on a flat surface of canvas or cartridge-paper.

On the very slight ground for connecting this work with the name of that almost mythological personage Dame Juliana Berners, or, to use the original form, Dam Julyans Barnes,' see Mr. Blades's preface to the newly-published facsimile edition of the Boke of St. Albans.'

are so numerous, that a mere catalogue of them forms a goodly volume, and enrols many an honoured name, chief among them being Izaak Walton and Sir Humphry Davy. These, however, are fishermen's books, and not works on ichthyology: sport and not science is their object. Then too there is a whole library on • Fisheries' fisheries in the restricted sense of the word, which eliminates Whales and Oysters and pearlsfisheries involving rights in defence of which the chief nations of Europe have not hesitated to equip navies and to set the battle in array. Was it not believed that the herring was 'king of the sea,' and that the Power that caught the most herrings must needs rule the waves? Even now much soreness exists between our American cousins and ourselves in regard to the cod-banks of Newfoundland, and not so very long ago it was only the forbearance of statesmen on both sides that settled what might have turned into a very pretty quarrel between this country and France as to the claims of the latter in the same part of the world. Yet it is obvious that all this interest was and is wholly distinct from any that may arise out of consideration of the Fish as an animal, of its place in creation, or of the light it may shed on the problems of life-in short of Ichthyology.

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Not to dwell on the obstacle which Ichthyologists themselves have raised to the popularity of their science by a hideous nomenclature-Ichthyology itself is uncouth enough, but what English lips can frame to pronounce right' such as Pharyngognathi and Chondropterygii ?—there is another difficulty in the way of the learner. In beginning the study of any department of Natural History, whether it relates to plants or to animals, the first effort is to find out characteristics of the smaller groups composing it, and to assort them in accordance with those characteristics-in short to arrange or classify them. The young conchologist, for example, sees in an instant, that out of a miscellaneous collection of shells some are bivalve and others univalve, and that some of them exhibit clear distinctions connected with the form of the animal to which the shell belongs. The young entomologist with still greater ease perceives the difference between most of the insects that come in his way, and indeed in some cases needs no instigation to look for them-the difference between a grasshopper and a house-fly, a beetle, a butterfly, and a moth, being self-evident to any one with eyes. We might carry the illustration indefinitely further amongst most of the animals known as Vertebrates. It requires no previous zoological instruction to enable any child to point out characters that will separate a snake from a tortoise, a rabbit from a sheep, a whale from a camel

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-and the rough primary division of all these creatures is at once perceptible. But with fishes this is not so. The learner, judging, as he is at first inclined to do, from outward survey, is surprised to find that the essential differences between a lamprey and an eel are deemed to be far greater than between an eel and a salmon, and that a skate is much further removed from a turbot than the latter is from a gudgeon, while a lancelet which, when immersed in a bottle of spirit, looks so like a small smelt, differs, in the opinion of certain systematists, more from it than the smelt does from a frog, or indeed from any other existing vertebrate. All this, which the learner finds written in the first book on the subject (if it be one of the least authority) to which he has

is so entirely in contradiction, as he thinks, to the plain evidence of his eyesight, that he may well be staggered at the outset of his studies and discouraged from their prosecution. If he perseveres, however, he will find that he need not despair. It was long, very long, before ichthyologists were able to arrive at some of the conclusions now universally accepted, and he may be pardoned for being no wiser than a Willughby nor more. learned than a Linnæus.

The classification of fishes has in truth been a task of no ordinary difficulty, and it is a subject requiring a far greater knowledge of their internal structure than can possiby be expected of a beginner. We shall not attempt to descant upon it here, for the matter is too technical for the general reader, though presently, in justice to the author of the book named at the head of this article, we shall have to relate in brief terms a brilliant discovery of his, which removed one of the chief obstacles, that had for many years exercised the ingenuity of zoologists to surmount. Moreover, though the subject now appears to be pretty clear to those who will undergo the labour of comprehending it, we have too much faith in the progress of ichthyology not to believe that from time to time other difficulties, at present unsuspected, will spring up, to be duly resolved doubtless, but for a while to puzzle even the most practised investigators of the science. It has been truly said that naturalists live a life of surprises, and it is of course impossible for any of us to indicate in what form difficulties will present themselves; but if we may judge from past experience, not only of this but of other departments of natural history, it would be very rash to presume that fresh obstacles will not arise, or to forecast the means by which they will be overcome. All we can say at present is that, though we know there is much more to be known, what we do know now is fairly sufficient to explain the difficulties that have as yet arisen.

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