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Updated: June 6, 2025
Soles and other flat-fish similarly resemble the sands or banks on which they lie, and accommodate themselves specifically to the particular colour of their special bottom.
Let me introduce the subject with a particular instance of evolution, the flat-fish. This animal has been fitted to survive the terrible struggle in the seas by acquiring such a form that it can lie almost unseen upon the floor of the ocean.
Turbot, plaice, and other flat-fish, which have no swim-bladder, lie with one side in the mud at the bottom of the sea or rivers Can you guess in which side of the head their eyes are placed? "In the uppermost, and sometimes both eyes are there." You are right, for there would be no use for an eye in the side turned to the mud.
In other cases the jaws are asymmetrical in a direction opposite to that of the eyes, there is no change of position but a much greater development of the lower half of the jaws, reduction, with absence of teeth, of the upper half. I contend, then, that the mode in which the normal Flat-fish develops is quite different from that in which mutations arise.
It was about half-an-hour after that, that I comes off with the milk for the wardroom mess, and a man named Will Heaviside says to me, `Stapleton, says he, `the first lieutenant has thrown my canvas trowsers overboard, and be damned to him; now I must have them back. `But where be they? says I: `I suppose down at the bottom by this time, and the flat-fish dubbing their noses into them. `No, no, says he, `they wo'n't never sink, but float till eternity; they be gone down with the tide, and they will come back again; only you keep a sharp look-out for them, and I'll give you five shillings if you bring them. Well, I seed little chance of ever seeing them again, or of my seeing five shillings, but as it so happened next tide, the very 'denticle pair of trowsers comes up staring me in the face.
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