[133]There are specimens of about 6000 kinds of fishes, in the Cabinet du Roi in Paris.
[134]He means, that in consequence of the lucrative nature of this fishery, it thence obtained the name of the “golden” horn.
[135]Seneca has two passages on this subject, which strongly bespeak the barbarous tastes of the Romans. He says: “A mullet even, if just caught, is thought little of, unless it is allowed to die in the hand of your guest. They are carried about enclosed in globes of glass, and their color is watched as they die—ever changing by the struggles of death into various shades and hues.” And again: “There is nothing, you say, more beautiful than the colors of the dying mullet; as it struggles and breathes forth its life, it is first purple, and then a paleness gradually comes over it; and then, placed as it is between life and death, an uncertain hue comes over it.”
[136]Seneca speaks of this cruel custom of pickling fish alive. “Other fish, again, they kill in sauces, and pickle them alive. There are some persons who look upon it as quite incredible that a fish should be able to live underground. How much more so would it appear to them, if they were to hear of a fish swimming in sauce, and that the chief dish of the banquet was killed at the banquet, feeding the eye before it does the gullet?”
[137]Juvenal, Sat. iv. l. 15, speaks of a mullet being bought for 6000 sesterces, a thousand for every pound, and Suetonius tells us that in the reign of Tiberius three mullets were sold for 30,000 sesterces. It is in allusion to this kind of extravagance that Juvenal says, in the same Satire, that it is not unlikely that the fisherman could be bought as a slave for a smaller sum than the fish itself. At the above rate, each of these mullets sold for nearly $400 of our money.
[138]Ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐχειν νῆας. “From holding back ships.”
[139]This division of the bloodless fish, made first by Aristotle, into the mollusca, testacea, and crustacea, has been followed by naturalists almost down to the present day.
[140]Probably this is merely the reproduction of the story of the nautilus with exaggerated details.
[141]It is now known, thanks to the research of Swammerdam, that the black points at the extremity of the great horns of the land snail, and at the base of them in the water snail, are eyes.