Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/552

534 movable spine at the base of the tail we may merely mention the herbivorous lancet-fish, although in its general outline it is scarcely more remarkable than a perch or a bream.

"Sea-ravens" (Hemipterus Fig. 23), "sea-robins" (Prionotus), "sea-swallows" (Dactylopterus), and sculpins (Cottus) may well be called strange fishes, for their forms are so marked and so strange that they at once arrest the attention of the commonest observer at the



sea-side. While all these have a certain general resemblance to one another, all agreeing in being remarkably ugly, each has its own marked peculiarities in the development of the head and fins, and in the curious fleshy filaments which are found upon some of them.

We may also justly include the little star-gazers (Uranoscopus, Fig. 24) of the Atlantic, whose eyes are so placed that they appear as if looking constantly toward the heavens, and whose mouth is cleft vertically, and has in it a long filament which can be protruded at will, and which is said to be used in attracting small fishes while the owner lies concealed in the mud.

Next we may mention the remora (Fig. 25), on whose head there is a sort of disk composed of laminæ which are serrated and movable, by means of which the fish can firmly attach itself to other animals.

It is said that it can be made useful by putting a ring attached to a line around its tail, and then allowing it to swim away in search of a victim; when it has firmly attached itself to a fish, both the remora and its captive are hauled in together.

Remarkable and strange as are all the forms of fishes which we have so far noticed, not one of them exhibits any want of bilateral symmetry. But we now come to a whole group of fishes, including