he middle
of Parson Grylls's sermon, he distinctly saw suspended in these same
elm-tops the image of an abnormally long pilot-fish (_naucretes
ductor_) he had received from a fishing-boat overnight and left at
home in his surgery mounted upon an apparatus of his own invention,
ready to be sketched before dissection. _Piscium et summa genus
haesit ulmo_ . . . for twenty seconds, rubbing his eyes, he stared at
the apparition as it very slowly faded.

It is on his researches in ichthyology, his list (no short one) of
discoveries, his patient classification of British Fishes, that his
fame rests. 'Why "British"?' the reader may ask. 'Have fishes,
then, our nationalities?' The doctor liked to think so. He was a
lover of his country, and for three years, while Napoleon threatened
us with invasion, he had served as a second-lieutenant in that famous
company, the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery, better known as
the Looe Die-hards. Now, in times of peace, with Britain supreme
upon the seas, he boldly claimed for her every fish found off these
shores. A sturgeon, even, might not visit our coastal waters,
however casual the occasion, without receiving the compliment of
citizenship for himself and his tribe. Yet Doctor Unonius patiently
tracked these creatures in their most distant migrations--'_motus et
migrationes diligentissime indagavit_,' says the mural tablet beneath
the window. The three lights of the window represent (1) Jonah
vomited by the Whale, (2) the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and (3)
St Peter, John Dory and the stater.

Polpeor, you must know, is a fishing-haven on the south coast of
Cornwall, famous during the Napoleonic Wars for its privateering, and
for its smuggling scarcely less notorious down to the middle of the
last century. The doctor's parents, though of small estate, had
earned by these and more legitimate arts enough money to set them
dreaming of eminence for their only child, and sent him up to London
to Guy's Hospital, where he studied surgery under the renowned Mr
Astley Cooper. Having qualified himself in this and in medicine, he
returned to his native home, which he never again left--save now and
then for a holiday--until the day of his death.

Assiduous in visiting the sick, he found the real happiness of his
life (one might almost say its real business) in his scientific and
literary recreations. The range and diversity of these may be
gathered from a list of his published