the seas, he boldly claimed for her every fish found off these shores.  A sturgeon, even, might not visit our coastal waters, however casual the occasion, without receiving the compliment of citizenship for himself and his tribe.  Yet Doctor Unonius patiently tracked these creatures in their most distant migrations—­’motus et migrationes diligentissime indagavit,’ says the mural tablet beneath the window.  The three lights of the window represent (1) Jonah vomited by the Whale, (2) the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and (3) St Peter, John Dory and the stater.

Polpeor, you must know, is a fishing-haven on the south coast of Cornwall, famous during the Napoleonic Wars for its privateering, and for its smuggling scarcely less notorious down to the middle of the last century.  The doctor’s parents, though of small estate, had earned by these and more legitimate arts enough money to set them dreaming of eminence for their only child, and sent him up to London to Guy’s Hospital, where he studied surgery under the renowned Mr Astley Cooper.  Having qualified himself in this and in medicine, he returned to his native home, which he never again left—­save now and then for a holiday—­until the day of his death.

Assiduous in visiting the sick, he found the real happiness of his life (one might almost say its real business) in his scientific and literary recreations.  The range and diversity of these may be gathered from a list of his published writings:  ’The Efficacy of Digitalis Applied to Scrofula,’ ’On the Carpenter Bee (Apis Centuncularis),’ ’Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth,’ ‘A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,’ ’The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom’ (abridged from Bernard), ’Migratory Birds of the West of England,’ ’God’s Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,’ ‘A Dissertation on the Mermaid,’ ’Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,’ ’Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,’ ’Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees,’ ‘Contributions to a Classification of British Crustacea,’ ‘On Man as the Image of the Deity,’ ’Daulias Advena; or, the Migrations of the Swallow Tribe.’  We select these from the output of one decade only.  A little later the activity grows less miscellaneous, and he is drifting upon his magnum opus, as the titles indicate, ‘Some Particulars of Rare Fishes found in Cornwall,’ ‘An Account of a Fish nearly allied to Hemiranphus,’ ’On the Occurrence of the Crustacean Scyllurus Arctus.’

He would announce these strange visitors—­sepia biserialis, for an instance—­with no less eagerness than a journalist hails the advent of a foreign potentate.  He had invented, as we have said, an apparatus on which he mounted them, with a jet of salt water that played over their scales and kept fresh, as he maintained, the delicate hues he copied from his water-colour box; with what success let anybody judge who has studied the four great volumes wherein these drawings survive, reproduced by lithography, and published by subscription.