Page:Natural History, Fishes.djvu/211

Rh crustaceous animals; and in reference to the tubular mouth, it is probable that by dilating the throat, these fishes can draw their food up their cylindrical beak, as water is drawn up the pipe of a syringe. The beak-like mouth is also well adapted for detaching minute animals from among the various sorts of sea-weed. The flesh of the Trumpet-fish is considered good."

The natural history of Fishes is very meagre, as compared with the other branches of Zoology. We have exceedingly few of those details of manners, those narratives of instinctive actions, those accounts of curious contrivances and stratagems by which the great purposes of animal life are fulfilled, those delightful anecdotes of individual biography,—that throw such a charm over the history of other Classes of Vertebrate animals. Yet we doubt not that there exist abundant materials for such narratives, could we but get at them; the observations very recently published on the nest-making habits of certain fishes, long familiar to us, but hitherto unsuspected of any such instincts, intimate to us that this Class of living beings is not destitute of those endowments which so beautifully illustrate the inexhaustible resources of wisdom and beneficent power that belong to God, and which are seen in endless variety in those creatures which are patent to our observations. A great, and we fear insuperable, difficulty which the naturalist meets with in prosecuting his investigations into the manners and economy of Fishes, is the nature of the element in which they live. Even the common species of our rivers and ponds