Nevertheless, peculiar degrees of heat, peculiar food, and peculiar habits, seem to confine them within certain limits in the seas, free as that element is. The warm seas are as a confining wall beyond which the polar species cannot pass; and on the other hand, the fish of the warm seas are stopped by the cold currents at the Cape of Good Hope. We know of only two or three species that can be properly called cosmopolitan. Few of them frequent the open sea; most of them hug the shore, and have favorite shores to frequent. Those of the United States are not those of Europe. Then, too, fish have peculiarities of taste which attach them to certain localities, though they do not actually confine them there. The Thornback grovels in the mud, Soles in sandy bottoms, the Bullhead loves the high bottoms, and the Sea Eel the rocks. The Scorpene, or flying fish, swims and flies by turns; when pursued by fish, she darts from the water, and for some distance sustains herself in the air; and when pursued by birds she drops back into the water.
The popular phrase, "As happy as a fish in water," is founded on a truth. In fine weather he floats at his ease, enabled as he is to rise or sink at pleasure, to make himself a balloon more or less filled with air, and therefore lighter or heavier. He moves in peace, rocked and caressed by the wave, and, if he so chooses, even sleeps as he floats. He is at once surrounded and isolated by the unctuous substance which renders his skin and his scales slippery and impenetrable by the water. His temperature varies but little and is neither too hot nor too cold. What a difference between a life so convenient, and that which is allotted to us dwellers upon the land; where at every step we meet with asperities and obstacles, which fatigue and exhaust us as we toil up or down our hills and mountains! The atmosphere varies, and often most cruelly, with our various seasons. For days and nights together, the cold rains pour pitilessly down, penetrating us; at times frozen, and piercing us with its sharp crystal points.
The felicity and fullness of life of the fish is shown at the Tropics by the splendor of his colors, and at the North by the swiftness of his motion. In Oceania and the Indian Sea they rove and sport in the oddest forms and colors, taking their pleasure among the corals, and living flowers. Our fish, of the temperate and cold seas, are potent rowers; thorough sailors. Their slender and elongated figures give them an arrowy swiftness and grace of movement, which might serve as ensample to our ship builders. Some of them have as many as ten fins which serve them, at will, as sails or oars, and may be kept wide spread or close-reefed. Their tail, that marvellous rudder, is also the principal oar. The best swimmers have it forked, the entire spine ends there and which contracting its muscles gives the fish his swift motion. The Thornback has two immense fins, two great wings to cleave the waves. His long, supple, and slender tail is a weapon with which to lash and divide the waters. So slender and displacing so little water, this fish has no need of the air bladder which supports the thicker fish. Thus each has the peculiar provisions that fit it for its peculiar locality and surroundings. The Sole is oval and flat that it may glide in the sand, the Eel long and slender that it may glide through the mud, and the Lophies, that they may cling to the rocks, have hand like fins that remind one rather of frogs than fish.
Sight is the great sense of the bird; scent is that of the fish. The Hawk, from above the clouds, pierces, with his glance, the deep space and marks the scarcely visible prey below; in like manner the Shark, from the depths of the water, scents his tempting prey, and darts upward upon it. Those that, like the Sturgeon, rummage the mud for food have exquisite touch. In the watery world half darkened, and having only uncertain and delusive lights, scent, and, in some cases, touch, must be relied on. The Shark, the Thornback and the Cod, with his great eyes, see badly, but have an exquisite sense of scent. The Thornback has that sense in such excess that he is provided with a veil for the express purpose of deadening it at will, when it probably affects his brain unpleasantly. To this powerful means of chasing their prey, we must add admirable teeth, sometimes like those of a saw. Some species have several rows of them, lining the mouth, the palate, the throat, and even the tongue. These teeth being so fine are, therefore, fragile; and behind, therefore, are others ready to replace them if they break.
At the commencement of this second book, we said that it was necessary that the sea should produce these terrible and mighty destroyers to combat her own too great fecundity. Death by persevering excision and bleedings relieved her of a plethora which, otherwise, would have destroyed her. Against that alarming torrent of production which we have instanced in the case of the Herring and the Cod, those frightful multiplying machines which would have choked up the ocean and desolated the earth, she defends herself by the machine of Death, the armed swimmer, the fierce and voracious fish. Great, splendid, impressive spectacle! The universal combat between Death and Life, which we witness upon the land, fades into insignificance when we compare it to that which is going on in the depths of the sea. There, its surpassing grandeur, at first, almost alarms us, but when we examine more closely we see that all is harmonious and in marvellous equilibrium. That fury is necessary; that dazzlingly rapid exchange of substance, that prodigality of slaughter, are safety. Nothing of sadness, but a wild fierce joy seems to reign in all this. In this opposition in the sea of two forces, that seem so inevitably destructive of each other, the sea finds her marvellous health, her incomparable purity, and a beauty at once sublime and terrible. She triumphs alike in the living and in the dead, giving to them and receiving from them the electricity, the light which beams, flashes, sparkles everywhere, even in the long, dark, polar night.
What is melancholy in the sea is not her carelessness to multiply death, but her impotence to reconcile progress with the excess of movement.
She is a hundred times, a thousand times richer, and more rapidly fecund than the earth. She even builds up for earth. The increase of the land, as we have seen in the case of the Corals, is given by the sea; the sea is no other than the parturient and laboring womb of the globe. Her sole obstacle is in the rapidity of her births; her inferiority appears in the difficulty, which, so rich in generation, she finds in organizing Love. It is melancholy to reflect that the myriads upon myriads of the inhabitants of the sea have only a vague, elementary, and imperfect, Love. Those vast tribes that, each in its turn, ascend and go in pilgrimage towards pleasure and light, give in floods the best of themselves, their very life, to blind and unknown chance. They love, and they will never know the beloved creature in which their dream, their desire, was incarnated; they produce multitudes, but never know their posterity. A few, a very few of the most active, warlike, and cruel species love after our human manner. Those terrific monsters, the Shark and his female, are obliged to approach each other. Nature has imposed upon them the peril of embracing. A terrible and suspicious embrace. Habitually they devour, eagerly and blindly, everything that comes in their path—animals, wood, stone, iron—anything, but in their fierce love, they restrain their hunger. They approach each other with their sawlike and fatal teeth, and the female intrepidly allows the male to seize her with his, and thus fastened together, they sometimes roll furiously about for weeks, unwilling to separate, even though famishing, and invincible in their fierce embrace, even by the fiercer tempest.
It is affirmed that even after they have separated, they lovingly pursue each other, the faithful male following his mate till the birth of his heir presumptive, the sole fruit of that marriage, and never, never devours him, but follows and watches over him. In fact, in case of peril to the sharkling, the excellent farther takes him into his vast throat, but to shelter, not digest him.
If the life of the sea has a dream, a wish, a confused desire, it is that of fixity. The violent and tyrannical embrace of the Shark, the fury of his union with the female give us an idea of a perfectly desperate love. Who knows if in other species, gentler and better fitted for families, who knows if this impotence of union, this eternal fluctuation of an objectless voyage, is not a cause of sadness? These children of the sea become owners of the land. Many of them ascend the rivers amorous with the fresh water, which they find so poor and possessed of so little nutriment, that they may deposit there, far from the raging waves, the hope of their posterity. At the very least they approach the shore in search of some sinuous and land locked creek. At this time they even become industrious, and with sand, mud, and grass endeavor to make little nests. A touching effort! They have none of the implements of the insect, that marvel of animal industry. They are far more destitute than the bird. By sheer dint of perseverance, without hands, or claws, or beak, and solely with their poor bodies, they yet pass and repass over it till they have pressed it into a sufficient cohesion, as Coste informs us in his description of the Sticklebacks. And what obstacles still await them! The female, blind and greedy, threatens the eggs, the male will not quit them, but guards and protects them, more motherly than the mother herself. This instinct is found in several species, especially in the humblest, the Gobies, a small fish, unfit for food, held in such contempt that if, by chance, caught, it is thrown back again to the water. Well, this lowest of the low is a tender father. Weak, small, destitute as he is, he, nevertheless, is the ingenious architect and laborious workman of the nest, and constructs it unaided, save by his tenderness and his strong will.
It moves one to pitying reverie, to perceive that such an effort of the heart is arrested at the first effort of art, and by the fatality of the world, in which its nature detains it. We feel that that world of waters is not all sufficient for itself.