springs from his bed,
floats around for a few moments, and falls heavily to the bottom,
opening a new pit with his pectoral, shovel-shaped swimming bladders.

The toad fish, the most hideous animal of the Mediterranean, goes
hunting in the same way. Three-fourths of his flattened body is made up
of head, mostly mouth, armed with hooks and curved knives. Guided by
his yellowish eyes fixed on top, he waves his pointed little beard, cut
like leaves, and a pair of dorsal appendages like feathers. This false
bait attracts the unwary ones and soon the cavernous mandibles close
upon them.

The plane fishes swim quickly over these monsters of the mire, that are
always horizontally flat resting upon their bellies, whilst the
flatness of the soles and others of the same species is vertical. The
two sides of the bodies of the soles, compressed laterally, have
different colorings. In this way, when lying down, they are able to
merge themselves at the same time with the light of the surface and the
shadow of the bottom, thus getting rid of their persecutors.

All the infinite varieties of the Mediterranean fauna were moving in
the other tanks.

There passed by the greenish plates of glass the giltheads, the
cackerels, and the sea roaches, clad in vivid silver with bands of gold
on their sides. There also flashed past the purple of the salmonoids,
the brilliant majesty of the gold fish, the bluish belly of the sea
bream, the striped back of the sheep's head, the trumpet-mouthed marine
sun-fish, the immovable sneer of the so-called "joker," the dorsal
pinnacle of the peacock-fish which appears made of feathers, the
restless and deeply bifurcated tail of the horse mackerel, the
fluttering of the mullet with its triple wings, the grotesque rotundity
of the boar-fish and the pig-fish, the dark smoothness of the
sting-ray, floating like a fringe, the long snout of the woodcock-fish,
the slenderness of the haddock, agile and swift as a torpedo, the red
gurnard all thorns, the angel of the sea with its fleshy wings, the
gudgeon, bristling with swimming angularities, the notary, red and
white, with black bands similar to the flourishes on signatures, the
modest _esmarrido_, the little sand fish, the superb turbot almost
round with fan tail and a swimming fringe spotted with circles, and the
gloomy conger-eel whose skin is as bluish black as that of the ravens.

Hidden between two rocks like the hunting crustaceans was the
_rascaza_,--t