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72 the rather to rush towards its victims. Notwithstanding this anthropophagous appetite, however, it is eaten with relish, and is publicly sold in the fish-markets. A graver objection to it is that it is occasionally poisonous, which the colonists believe is owing to its feeding on submerged "copper-banks," or else to its having eaten the deadly fruit of the Manchioneel-tree. If incautiously tasted under such circumstances, it is said to produce sickness, vomiting, and intolerable pain in the head, accompanied with loss of the hair and nails; and, in very bad cases, immediate death is the result. As a criterion of its wholesomeness, the teeth and liver are examined; if the former be white and the latter bitter, it is sound; but if the teeth be green and the liver sweetish, it cannot be eaten with impunity.

"What has been reported," observes M. Cuvier, "of the poisonous fishes of hot countries, and of that disease called siguatera, which they occasion in certain circumstances, is so curious and interesting, that I am justified in inserting the information collected by M. Plée on the Barracoota, which I have found in the papers of that unfortunate naturalist. Many persons, says he, fear to eat this fish because they have had frequent evidence of its causing disease, and sometimes death. This poisonous quality of the Barracoota belongs very certainly to a particular state of the individual, which appears to occur at different seasons of the year.

"I have consulted many persons with regard to the poison of the Barracoota; all have assured me that there is an infallible mode of determining whether it is, or is not, poisonous. For this end