Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/546

530 parallel among fishes. As to weapons—daggers, spears, swords, are all possessed by fish in a very high state of natural perfection, and even guns have a representative institution among fishes. A Shooting-Fish would no doubt be looked upon almost as a lusus naturæ by the average Englishman, who rarely includes ichthyology among his studies—a fact which is very much to be lamented, for we have large national interests bound up in that science; in fact, we owe a great deal more to fishes than any other nation, not even excluding the Dutch, some of whose cities were formerly figuratively described as built on fish-bones, and a professorial chair of Ichthyology at the universities would be by no means an unwise institution. It is not many years since, that a review which was published in an influential paper, dealing, among other things, with this special point, contemptuously dismissed the fact (as a traveller's tale) of there being such a thing as a shooting-fish. The ignorance among the general public on every thing relating to fish is at times perfectly surprising. I have seen small, worthless bass passed off as gray mullet; I have seen even nasty, gravid pond-roach hawked about as gray mullet; I have seen large bass actually sold for salmon at one of our fashionable watering-places. After this, if the Londoner constantly buys coarse, dry, tasteless bull-trout as fine Tay salmon, it is not to be wondered at.

The Eton boy hastening home for the holidays provides himself with a tin tube and a pocketful of peas. We beg the present Etonian's pardon; we should have said he used to do so formerly, when there were boys at Eton, and, backed by some skill as a marksman, therewith constituted himself an intolerable nuisance to every village and vehicle he passed on his road home. The Macoushee Indian makes a better use of his blow-tube; he puffs small arrows and hardened balls of clay through it with unerring aim, doing great execution among birds and other small game. Now, the Chætodon (Chotodon rostratus), which is more or less a native of the Eastern seas from Ceylon to Japan, rather perhaps resembles the Macoushee Indian than the Eton boy, though his gun, shooting-tube, or blow-pipe, or whatever it may be termed, is a natural one. His nose is really a kind of "beak," through which he has the power of propelling a small drop of water with some force and considerable accuracy of aim. Near the edge of the water is perhaps a spray of weed, a twig, or a tuft of grass; on it sits a fly, making its toilet in the watery mirror below. Rostratus advances cautiously under the fly; then he stealthily projects his tube from the water, takes a deadly aim, as though he were contesting for some piscatory Elcho shield, and pop goes the watery bullet.

Knocked over by the treacherous missile, drenched, stunned, half drowned, she drops from her perch into the waters below, to be sucked in by the Chætodon.