Copy 1, Volume 1

A history of British fishes / By William Yarrell ... Illustrated by nearly 400 woodcuts.

  • William Yarrell
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of British fishes / By William Yarrell ... Illustrated by nearly 400 woodcuts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/464 (page 21)
    summer I was preparing a bottle of fishes for your use, I pierced a Lesser Forked Beard with a pointed probe through the mouth into the air-bladder in order to render the fish small enough to enter the bottle; but being obliged also to squeeze it with some force for that purpose, the dorsal fin became distended with air—a circumstance that would direct our attention to the air-bladder as the source of the air dis- tending the fins and tunic of the eyes in the Gadide.” The analogy to the air-cells in birds, and the passage of air from thence into the bones of the limbs, is too obvious to be unobserved, and will give interest to further investiga- tion. Except in the cartilaginous Sharks and Rays, there are no very obvious external signs by which the sexes in fishes can be distinguished. As in the higher animals, however, the respiratory organs occupy more space in the males than in the females ; and on the other hand, the abdomen is larger in the females than in the males: the males may therefore be known from the females by their somewhat sharper or more pointed head, the greater length of the gill-cover, and the body from the dorsal fin downwards being not so deep com- pared with the whole length of the fish. Among fishes generally a few are viviparous, bringing forth their young alive, which are able from the time of ex- clusion to shift for themselves. Of these some notice is taken in the body of the work when describing the particular species. ‘The sexual parts are of a higher degree of organiza- tion in the Sharks and Rays, and more complicated in their structure than those of the bony fishes, resembling the sexual organs in reptiles; and their mode of producing their young is described also at the commencement of the history of each, and need not therefore be repeated here. The sexual organs in by far the greater number of fishes