Ferragut sought on the bottom of the tanks the fishes of the deep,—­flattened animals that pass the greater part of their time sunk in the sand under a coverlet of algae.  The dark uranoscopo, with its eyes almost united on the peak of its enormous head and its body in the form of a club, leaves visible only a long thread coming from its lower jaw, waving it in all directions in order to attract its prey.  Believing it a worm, the victims usually chase the moving bait until pounced upon by the teeth of the hunter who then springs from his bed, floats around for a few moments, and falls heavily to the bottom, opening a new pit with his pectoral, shovel-shaped swimming bladders.

The toad fish, the most hideous animal of the Mediterranean, goes hunting in the same way.  Three-fourths of his flattened body is made up of head, mostly mouth, armed with hooks and curved knives.  Guided by his yellowish eyes fixed on top, he waves his pointed little beard, cut like leaves, and a pair of dorsal appendages like feathers.  This false bait attracts the unwary ones and soon the cavernous mandibles close upon them.

The plane fishes swim quickly over these monsters of the mire, that are always horizontally flat resting upon their bellies, whilst the flatness of the soles and others of the same species is vertical.  The two sides of the bodies of the soles, compressed laterally, have different colorings.  In this way, when lying down, they are able to merge themselves at the same time with the light of the surface and the shadow of the bottom, thus getting rid of their persecutors.

All the infinite varieties of the Mediterranean fauna were moving in the other tanks.

There passed by the greenish plates of glass the giltheads, the cackerels, and the sea roaches, clad in vivid silver with bands of gold on their sides.  There also flashed past the purple of the salmonoids, the brilliant majesty of the gold fish, the bluish belly of the sea bream, the striped back of the sheep’s head, the trumpet-mouthed marine sun-fish, the immovable sneer of the so-called “joker,” the dorsal pinnacle of the peacock-fish which appears made of feathers, the restless and deeply bifurcated tail of the horse mackerel, the fluttering of the mullet with its triple wings, the grotesque rotundity of the boar-fish and the pig-fish, the dark smoothness of the sting-ray, floating like a fringe, the long snout of the woodcock-fish, the slenderness of the haddock, agile and swift as a torpedo, the red gurnard all thorns, the angel of the sea with its fleshy wings, the gudgeon, bristling with swimming angularities, the notary, red and white, with black bands similar to the flourishes on signatures, the modest esmarrido, the little sand fish, the superb turbot almost round with fan tail and a swimming fringe spotted with circles, and the gloomy conger-eel whose skin is as bluish black as that of the ravens.