There are three great aquariums in the world, at Honolulu, Naples, and New York.  There is no other such fish-market as this of Papeete, for Hawaii’s has become Asiaticized, and the kanaka is almost nil in the angling art there.  But those same fish that I gazed at in amazement in the tanks of the museums are spread out here on tables for my buying.

Impossible fish they are, pale blue; brilliant yellow; black as charcoal; sloe, with orange stripes; scarlet, spotted, and barred in rainbow tints.  The parrot-fish are especially splendid in spangling radiancy, their tails and a spine in their mouths giving them their name.

The impression made upon one’s first visit to the Papeete market is overwhelming, the plenitude of nature rejoicing one’s heart, and the care of the Great Consciousness for beauty and color, and even for the ludicrous, the merely funny, causing curious groping sensations of wonder at the varied plan of creation.

Sexual selection and suitability to survive are responsible.  Those vivid colors, those symmetrical markings, and laughable forms are all part of the going on of the world, the adaptation to environment, and the desire for love and admiration in the male and female.

These things from the deep seem hardly fish.  They are bits of the sunset, fragments of a mosaic, Futuristic pictures; anything but our sodden, gray, or wateryhued fish of temperate climes.  Some are as green as the hills of Erin, others as blue as the sky, as crimson as blood, as yellow as the flag of China.  They are cut by nature in many patterns, round, or sectional, like a piece of pie, triangular, almost square; some with a back fin that floats out a foot or two behind.

They are grotesque, alarming, apparently the design of a joker.  But tread not on the domain of the scientist, for he will prove to you that each separate queerness is only a trick of nature to fit its owner to the necessities of his habitat.  The parrot-fish are screamingly fantastic.  There are not even in the warm California or Florida waters the duplicates of these rainbow fish.  The Garibaldi perch and the electric fish excite interest at Santa Catalina, but here are a hundred marvels, and if I wish I can see them all as they swim in and out of the coral caverns within the lagoon.

Porcupine fish are a delicacy, squid are esteemed, and even the devilfish is on the tables, hideous, repellent, slimy, horned, and tentacled; not mighty enough to crush out the life of the fisher, as was the horrific creature in Victor Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea,” whom his hero fought, yet menacing even when dead.  It is a frightful figure in its aspect of hatred and ugliness, but good to eat.  See that fat Tahitian thrust his finger into the sides of the octopus to plumb its cooking qualities.  It is quickly sold.