CHAPTER XI.

THE FISH.

It was inevitable that the free element, the Sea, should, sooner or later, produce a creature like unto herself, eminently free, undulating and fluid, gliding like the wave, but with a marvellous mobility founded on an interior miracle greater still, on an internal organization at once delicate and strong, and very elastic, such as no creature had previously ever approached to.

The Mollusc, crawling on its belly, was the poor serf of the glebe, and the Poulpe, with all his swelling and threatening pride, swimming badly and unable to walk or crawl at all, was still more completely the serf of chance. The warlike crustaceæ, by turns so high and so low, alternately the terror and derision of all, were at times the slave, the prey of even the weakest creatures.

Great and terrible servitudes those; how were they to be remedied?

Strength is the very soul of liberty. From the very beginning, Life seems gradually but confusedly to have sought the creation of a central axis which should give the creature unity, and enormously increase its strength of motion. The rayed family and the molluscs exhibit a presentiment, a partial sketch of it, but they were too much led away by the insoluble problem of the exterior defence. The covering, always the covering, was that which constantly occupied the attention of these poor beings. As to that one point, they produced masterpieces; the thorny ball of the Oursin, the shell at once open and closed of the Haliotide, and, finally, the armors of jointed pieces of the Crustaceæ, are the very perfection of armor at once defensive and terribly offensive. What more could be required? It would seem, _nothing_.

_Nothing?_ Say, rather, everything. Let us have a creature who shall trust entirely to motion, a creature of freedom and audacity, that shall look down upon all these creatures as infirm, or miserably slow; a creature that shall consider the envelope as a merely secondary matter, and concentrate his whole strength within himself.

The crustaceæ shroud themselves, as it were, in an exterior skeleton. The fish has his skeleton within, to which nerves, muscles, and all organs are attached.

This seems a fanciful invention, and one quite contrary to good sense; to place the hard and the solid beneath the thick covering of the soft! To place the bone, so useful without, precisely where it seems it must be so useless! The crustaceæ must needs have laughed in derision when they first saw the short, thick, soft fish of the Indian Ocean, for instance, without defensive armor, having no strength save inwardly, protected only by its oily fluidity, by the exuberant mucus that surrounds it, and which by degrees consolidates into elastic scales, a slight cuirass, which ever yielding, never yields entirely.

It was a revolution comparable to that of Gustavus Adolphus, when he relieved his soldiery of their heavy iron armor, and covered their breasts only with the at once stout and yielding buff leather. A late revolution, but a wise one.

Our fish, being no longer confined like the crab or lobster, imprisoned in armor, is at the same time relieved from the cruel condition inseparable from that armor, the _moulting_, with its attendant danger, weakness, struggle, and enormously wasteful expenditure of strength. Like the superior animals and man, he moults slowly. He economises and hoards up strength, and creates for himself the treasure of a powerful nervous system, with numerous telegraphic threads that connect spine and brain. Even when the bone is soft or absent, and the fish preserves its embryonic appearance, he has nevertheless his great harmony in that abundant provision of nervous threads.

We do not find in the fish the elegant weakness of the reptile and the insect, so slender that in those parts one can cut through them as through a thread; his segments are within, and well protected. He uses them for contractile power, but does not, as the less perfect reptile and insect do, expose them to external injury.

Like the crustaceæ, the fish prefers strength to beauty, and for this end has no neck; head and trunk form one mass. Admirable principle of strength, which enables him, in cleaving through so yielding an element as water, to strike, at will, with a thousand fold more force than is necessary, and then his motion is as the flight of an arrow or the flash of lightning!

The interior bone, single in the Seiche, is in the fish at once one and multiple; one for force of unity, multiple for elasticity, enabling the muscles alternately to contract and expand, and thus create swift motion. Marvellous, really marvellous is that formation of the fish, so solid without and contractile within, that inward keel to which are attached the motor muscles which work with an alternating shock. Exteriorly, he exposes only his auxiliary oars, short fins which are but little in danger, being strong, slippery, and sharp to wound, or to scrape. How superior in all this is the fish, to the Poulpe and the Medusa, which present to all comers soft flesh, a tempting morsel for the crustaceæ or the porpoise.

This true son of the water, gliding and mobile as his mother, glides by means of his mucus, cleaves with his head, impelled by his contractile muscles, and finally, with his strong fins rows and steers.

The least of these powers would suffice, but he unites them all; a perfect model and absolute type of swift motion.

Even the bird is less mobile, seeing that he has to perch. He is fixed for the night, but the fish, never; even asleep, he still floats.

So extremely mobile, he at the same time is in the highest degree strong and lively. Wherever there is water, there is the fish: he is the universal creature of the globe. In the loftiest lakes of Asia and of the Cordilleras, where the atmosphere is so rarefied that no other creature can endure it, the fish lives and thrives. It is the red fish of the Gudgeon species, which thus looks down upon all the earth. In like manner, in the great depths, beneath the most enormous weights, live the Herring and the Cod. Forbes, who divides them into ten superposed beds or stages, finds them all inhabited, and in the lowest of all, supposed to be so dark, he finds a fish provided with eyes so admirable that he finds sufficient light in that which seems to us the uttermost darkness of night.

There is yet another privilege of the fish. Many species, as Salmon, Shad, Eels, Sturgeon, &c., can live equally in fresh water or sea water, and regularly migrate from one to the other. Many families of fish include both sea fish and fresh water fish, as for instance, the Thornback.

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.

Great mother that hath commenced life, thou canst not perfect it; allow thy daughter, the Earth, to continue the work. You see it, even in your bosom; your children think of Earth and long for its fixity; they approach her, offer her their homage.

It is for thee still to commence the series of new beings, by an unexpected prodigy, a grandiose rough draft of the warm amorous life, of blood, of milk, of tenderness which will have its development in the terrestrial races.