FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.
And now, before leaving the minor and intermediate types of ocean life for the monsters of the deep, a few general observations may be permitted. Pliny described 94 species of fish; Linnæus described 478; the scientists of to-day know upwards of 13,000, one-tenth of which are fresh-water fish. The reader will then understand why only a few of the more important, useful, or curious have been described in these pages.
A hard man of science once described fish-life as “silent, monotonous, and joyless.” Modern science has disproved each and all of these statements. As regards the first, there are species actually known which “indulge in jews’-harps, trumpets, and drums.... Musical fish are a fact of positive knowledge, for not only can they be heard in shoals thrumming their jews’-harps in unison, but other kinds have been taken in the very act of trumpeting and drumming.” Bertram, as we have seen, speaks of the “death-chirp” of the captured herring. The application of the telephone has proved that a fish, placed alone in some water, actually talked to itself! Mr. S. E. Peal, in a letter to a scientific journal, tells us of a large fish, Barbes macrocephalus, which converses with a peculiar “cluck,” or persuasive sound, which may be heard as far as forty feet from the water. He also mentions a bivalve of Eastern Assam which actually “sings loudly in concert.”
How fish-life could be called monotonous and joyless will puzzle any one who has watched them in a large aquarium, where their every movement tells of pleasure, or at least excitement. Imagine, then, their life in the ocean itself. All around them is life—life in constant activity. The ancients said, and Pliny assented to the dictum, that in the water might be found anything or everything that was found out of it, and as much more besides. Then there is the excitement of the chase, in which they may be either the pursued or the pursuers. “Not only,” said a writer in a leading daily journal, “can they indulge themselves in running away from sharks, as we should do from tigers if they swarmed in the streets, in contemplating the while the elephant of the seas sauntering along through his domain, or finding diversion and instruction in the winged process of the flying-fish or the tree-climbing of perch, the buffooneries of sun-fish and pipe-fish, the cunning artifices of the ‘angler-fish,’ the electric propensities of some, the luminosity of others, the venomous nature of these or the grotesque appearance of those—not only is all the variety of experience to be found on the earth to be found also in the water, but even in a wider range and a greater diversity. The sea floor is strewn with marvels, and the rocks are instinct with wonders.” Fish-life is, then, full of excitement and interest.
An accomplished ichthyologist, Mr. F. Francis, has stirred up the vexed question, “Do fish sleep?” Only a very few fish, the dog-fish being one of the few exceptions, can close their eyes at all. Still, on the other hand, some human beings, and notably infants, can sleep with one or both eyes open, while the hare is credited with being able to take his nap in the latter condition. Fish would seem to require sleep from their constant activity; but in actual fact, no scientific watcher has yet caught one asleep.
CHAPTER XVI.
Monsters of the Deep.[48]
Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the “Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.