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The other species of flying gurnard occur in the Indian Ocean and the seas around China and Japan. The true flying-fish, however, that is to say, those that are met with in the great ocean, and most spoken of in books, and in the "yarns" of the sailor, are altogether of a different kind from the gurnards. They are not only different in genus, but in the family and even the order of fishes.
Meanwhile, he regretted his incapacity to give them a specimen of the aliens, or fish meals of the ancients, such as the jus diabaton, the conger-eel, which, in Galen's opinion, is hard of digestion; the cornuta, or gurnard, described by Pliny in his Natural History, who says, the horns of many of them were a foot and a half in length, the mullet and lamprey, that were in the highest estimation of old, of which last Julius Caesar borrowed six thousand for one triumphal supper.
Among the latter I observed a species of dogfish called the cow shark that's equipped with six respiratory slits, the telescope fish with its enormous eyes, the armored gurnard with gray thoracic fins plus black pectoral fins and a breastplate protected by pale red slabs of bone, then finally the grenadier, living at a depth of 1,200 meters, by that point tolerating a pressure of 120 atmospheres.
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.
The West part of the land was high browed much like the head of a Gurnard, and the Eastermost land was lower, and had on it three tufts of trees like stackes of wheate or corne, and the next day in the morning we sawe but two of those trees, by reason that we went more to the Eastward. And here we road still from the 14 of Februarie vntill the 14 of Aprill, with the winde at Southwest.
Yet it is only a Shark with flattened body, and whose side fins are so large that they spread out like fleshy wings. The mouth is on the under part, as it is in all Sharks. Blue Shark. 2. Saw Fish. 3. Starry Ray. 4. Ox Ray. 5. Plaice. 6. Trunk Fish. 7. Blue Striped Wrasse. 8. Malted Gurnard. 9. These flattened Sharks must be a terror to their neighbours.
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