Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/269

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10
THE INDIAN OCEAN.

noise they emit; then there were “dromedary” fish, with large humps, whose flesh is hard and coarse.

I also extract from the notes daily taken by Conseil certain fish of the tetrodon genus peculiar to these seas with red backs and white bellies, which are marked by three longitudinal rows of filaments; and electric eels seven feet in length, adorned with most beautiful colours.

Then, as specimens of other genus, there were ovoïds like a brownish-black egg, striped with white bands, and tailless; disdons, regular sea-porcupines, furnished with quills, and able to swell themselves out so as to present the appearance of a ball bristling with spikes. The sea-horses common to all oceans; the flying pegasus, with long snouts and with their pectoral fins so elongated and disposed in the form of wings that they can almost fly—at least rise into the air; pigeon-spatulæ, whose tails are covered with numerous scaly rings; macrognathes, with long jaws—excellent fish, twenty-five centimetres long, and shining with various colours; pale calliomores, with reddish heads; myriads of blennies, striped with black, and shooting to the surface with prodigious velocity, aided by their long pectoral fins; the trichopteres, whose wings are formed of filaments; trygles, whose liver is considered poison; bodians, which wear a movable blinker on the eyes; and, finally, the blow-fish, or chætodons, having a long tubular snout; fly-catchers, armed with a gun which neither chassepots nor Remingtons can beat, and which kill the insects by shooting a drop of water at them.

In the eighty-ninth genus of fishes classed by Lacépède, which belongs to the second sub-class of Ossians, characterised by an operculum and a bronchial membrane, I remarked the scorpena, the head of which is furnished with spikes, and which only possesses a single dorsal fin; these