Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/211

Rh the small dark dots below each red spot, and the occasional breaks in the lines of the silver-white keel streaks?"

The perch of the forest rivers include several nest-building varieties, and the sportsmen of Kingston, Jamaica, often amuse themselves with target practice at a species of rock fish that come clear out of the water and bask, like coots, on the harbor cliffs.

With every mile farther south the number and variety of the finned aborigines become more infinite, and the fishermen of the estuary of San Juan de Porto Rico alone catch pompanos, mullets, cavalli, red snappers, chiquillos (a kind of sardelles), sea bass, dorados, skip-jack, angelfish, skate, ray, sheepshead, garfish, torpedo-fish, devilfish or giant ray, cobia, hogfish, croakers, shark, and coryphenes.

The tiger of the sea, the great white shark, occasionally visits the harbor waters of Cuba, and has been known to seize barefooted peons, surf-bathing horses in the next neighborhood of Morro Castle, and drag them under so suddenly that their companions were unable to account for their disappearance till the foam of the breakers became flecked with blood.

That champion of marine man-eaters is as smooth as a hypocrite, and hides its double row of horrible fangs under a slippery nose, while the little butterfly fish tries its best to disguise its helplessness with a crest of spiny fins. Its length rarely exceeds four inches, and it can be handled with impunity, but its spines are just rigid enough to entangle it in tufts of gulf weed, and in company of equally tiny sea horses and goldfish, it can often be seen in the aquariums of the Jamaica seaport towns.

 

HERE is not an enlightened person in the world who does not deplore the anarchist crime committed last summer by Luccheni in Geneva upon the unfortunate Empress of Austria. With grief is associated the duty of inquiring what could have been the origin of a misdeed which besides being cruel had the vice of being absurd, falling as it did upon a poor woman near the tomb, who was ready to welcome death, and who had no political influence, by an assassin who had not suffered any offense from her or from her government, and who further had the impudence to boast of his crime as if it had been a heroic act.