The little
creatures are very pretty, well-formed catfish, with bright, intelligent
eyes, and a body armed all over, like the armadillo's, with a continuous
coat of hard and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in
most fish, but of toughened skin, as in crocodiles and alligators,
arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated shields, exactly like the
round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks,
or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement of a
pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided by the steering
action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling motion of his
entire body. Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the
common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries
Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must
have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by
their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the
polyonymous South Kensington building. But while the European gurnard
only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, my itinerant
tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Callichthys) uses
them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry lowlands of his
native country. And while the gurnard has no less than six of these
pro-legs, the American land fish has only a single pair with which to
accomplish his arduous journeys.
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