There are fish that wriggle across country intrepidly with
the dexterity and agility of the most accomplished snakes; there are
fish that walk about on open sand-banks, semi-erect on two legs, as
easily as lizards; there are fish that hop and skip on tail and fins in
a manner that the celebrated jumping frog himself might have observed
with envy; and there are fish that fly through the air of heaven with a
grace and swiftness that would put to shame innumerable species among
their feathered competitors. Nay, there are even fish, like some kinds
of eels and the African mud-fish, that scarcely live in the water at
all, but merely frequent wet and marshy places, where they lie snugly in
the soft ooze and damp earth that line the bottom. If I have only
succeeded, therefore, in relieving the mind of one sensitive and
retiring fish from the absurd obloquy cast upon its appearance when it
ventures away for awhile from its proper element, then, in the pathetic
and prophetic words borrowed from a thousand uncut prefaces, this work
will not, I trust, have been written in vain.
THE FIRST POTTER
Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.
Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and
primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and
lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his
antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the
side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle.
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