tain crabs and the dolorous moaning near the
surface of certain fishes, called snorers, alter this silence.

Since the ocean lacks acoustic waves, their inhabitants have never
needed to form the organs that transform them into sound. They feel
impetuously the primal necessities of animal life,--hunger and love.
They suffer madly the cruelty of sickness and pain; among themselves
they fight to the death for a meal or a mate. But all in absolute
silence, without the howl of triumph or agony with which terrestrial
animals accompany the same manifestations of their existence.

Their principal sense is that of smell, as is that of sight in the
bird. In the twilight world of the ocean, streaked with phosphorescent
and deceptive splendors, the big fish trust only to their sense of
smell and at times to that of touch.

Sometimes buried in the mud, they will ascend hundreds of yards,
attracted by the odor of the fish that are swimming on the surface.
This prodigious faculty renders useless, in part, the colors in which
the timid species clothe themselves in order to confound themselves
with lights or shadows. The greatest flesh-eaters see badly, but they
scrape the bottom with a divining touch and scent their prey at
astonishing distances.

Only the Mediterranean fishes, especially those of the Gulf of Naples,
were living in the tanks of this Aquarium. Some were lacking,--the
dolphin, of nervous movement, and the tunny, so impetuous in its
career. The captain smiled upon thinking of the mischievous pranks of
these ungovernable guests whose presence had been declined.

The voracious shark (_cabeza de olla_), the persecuting wolf of the
Mediterranean herds, was not here either. In his place were swimming
other animals of the same species, whitish and long, with great fins,
with eyes always open for lack of movable eyelids, and a mouth split
like a half-moon, under the head at the beginning of the stomach.

Ferragut sought on the bottom of the tanks the fishes of the
deep,--flattened animals that pass the greater part of their time sunk
in the sand under a coverlet of algae. The dark _uranoscopo_, with its
eyes almost united on the peak of its enormous head and its body in the
form of a club, leaves visible only a long thread coming from its lower
jaw, waving it in all directions in order to attract its prey.
Believing it a worm, the victims usually chase the moving bait until
pounced upon by the teeth of the hunter who then