Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/547

Rh But if we have fishes who can shoot their game, we have also fishes who can fish for it; ay, and fish for it with rod and line, and bait, as deftly as ever angler coaxed gudgeons from the ooze of the New River or salmon from the flashing torrent of the Spey. Witness this clumsy-looking monster the Fishing-Frog (Lophius piscatorius). Frightful and hideous is he, according to our vulgar notions of loveliness, which the Lophius possibly might disagree with. The beast is sometimes five or six feet in length, with an enormous head in proportion to the rest of its body, and with huge sacs like bag-nets attached to its gill-covers, in which it stows its victims; and what a cavernous mouth! Surely a fish so repulsive, and with a capacity so vast and apparently omnivorous, would frighten from its neighborhood all other fish, and would, if its powers of locomotion were in accordance with its size, be the terror of the seas to fish smaller than itself; but Providence knoweth how to temper its gifts, and the Lophius is but an indifferent swimmer, and is too clumsy to support a predatory existence by the fleetness of its motions. How, then, is this huge capacity satisfied? Mark those two elongated tentacles which spring from the creature's nose, and how they taper away like veritable fishing-rods. To the end of them is attached, by a line or a slender filament, a small glittering morsel of membrane. This is the bait. The hooks are set in the mouth of the fisherman down below. But how is the animal to induce the fish to venture within reach of those formidable hooks? Now mark this perfect feat of angling. How does the Thames fisherman attract the gudgeons? They are shy; he must not let them see him, yet he must draw them to him, and he does it by stirring up the mud upon the bottom. "In that cloud of mud is food," say the gudgeons. Then the angler plies his rod and bait. Just so the Lophius proceeds, and he too stirs up the mud with his fins and tail. This serves not only to hide him, but to attract the fish. Then he plies his rod, and the glittering bait waves to and fro like a living insect glancing through the turbid water. The gudgeons, or rather gobies, rush toward it. "Beware! beware!" But when did gudgeon attend to warning yet? Suddenly, up rises the cavernous Nemesis from the cloud below, and "snap!" the gobies are entombed in the bag-net, thence to be transferred to the Lophius's stomach, when there are enough of them collected to form a satisfactory mouthful.

But we have still other sportsmen-fish; we have fish who hunt their prey singly, or in pairs, or even in packs, like hounds. The reader, possibly, has never witnessed a skäll in Scandinavia. It is a species of hunt in which a number of sportsmen take in a wide space of ground, where game exists, drawing a cordon around it, and narrowing their circle little by little, and driving the game together into a flock, when they shoot them down. There was some years ago a capital description of porpoises making a skäll upon sand-eels, written by the late Mr. James Lowe, sometime editor of the Critic and "Chronicler" of the