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Updated: May 12, 2025
I can still see his fish-like face, hair brushed back with scrupulous care, as without a shadow of emotion he looked up, puffed his pipe, and said in matter-of-fact tones: "You have a pretty face and an excellent figure. Need I say more?" I could have struck him in the face. I was speechless, my mind a whirl of conflicting emotions. I was roused by the level tones again.
But it is certain that all the Vertebrates or Gnathostomes, from the fishes to man, descend from a common, extinct, fish-like ancestor. If we had this ancient stem-form before us, we would undoubtedly class it as a true fish. Fortunately the comparative anatomy and classification of the fishes are now so far advanced that we can get a very clear idea of these interesting and instructive features.
Only think how stuck up they would be above the lowly mollusks of the same waters, if they knew themselves as Acanthopterygii, and were aware that their great-grandfather was an Acanthopteryx before them, and so away back in the age of waters that once were over all! "Very ancient and fish-like" is their genealogy, to be sure!
And Rosenberg found it. In the same way the “gill-clefts” of the fish-like ancestors have long since been discovered in the embryo of the higher vertebrates and of man.
The rude approach to the human outline, observed in the shape of the head of this creature, and the attitude of the mother when suckling her young, clasping it to her breast with one flipper, while swimming with the other, holding the heads of both above water; and when disturbed, suddenly diving and displaying her fish-like tail, these, together with her habitual demonstrations of strong maternal affection, probably gave rise to the fable of the "mermaid;" and thus that earliest invention of mythical physiology may be traced to the Arab seamen and the Greeks, who had watched the movements of the dugong in the waters of Manaar.
Bude looked round wildly. His large, fish-like mouth twitched, and he made a few feeble gestures with his hands. "It was only perhaps an idea of mine, sir," he stammered, "just a sort of idea ... I dare say I was mistaken. My hearing ain't what it was, sir...." "Don't you try to hoodwink me," said Manderton, with sudden ferocity, knitting his brows and frowning at the unfortunate butler.
Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe." And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden light: "I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!" The Pequod Meets The Bachelor
I have been in the witness-box, exposed to the licensed badgering and privileged impertinence of a lawyer, winked, leered, frowned, and sneered at with all the long-practised tact of a nisi prius torturer; I have stood before the cold, fish-like, but searching eye of a prefect of police, as he compared my passport with my person, and thought he could detect a discrepancy in both, but I never felt the same sense of total exposure as when glanced at by the half-cautious, half-prying look of a worthy father or mother, in a family where there are daughters to marry, and "nobody coming to woo."
On steep domestic roofs, there is no ornament better than may be obtained by merely rounding, or cutting to an angle, the lower extremities of the flat tiles or shingles, as in Switzerland: thus the whole surface is covered with an appearance of scales, a fish-like defence against water, at once perfectly simple, natural, and effective at any distance; and the best decoration of sloping stone roofs, as of spires, is a mere copy of this scale armor; it enriches every one of the spires and pinnacles of the cathedral of Coutances, and of many Norman and early Gothic buildings.
Outside a stream of carriages, containing richly dressed women moved up Fifth Avenue, dividing as it approached the mounted police at the corner, and Perry, as Kemper went up to him, was following with a dulled fish-like glance the pronounced figure of a lady who held the reins over a handsome pair of bays.
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