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Updated: May 7, 2025
I saw many kinds which I never before had a chance of observing. I shall notice chiefly ostracions peculiar to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and that part which washes the coast of tropical America. These fishes, like the tortoise, the armadillo, the sea-hedgehog, and the Crustacea, are protected by a breastplate which is neither chalky nor stony, but real bone.
In the highest and steepest parts of the mountain chain may be found marine petrifactions of every variety the sea-hedgehog, the oyster, the mussel, and the star-fish; and in the beds of trachytic rock, deposited in such order that one might fancy they had been placed there by a careful and tasty housewife, are layers of the most curious shells, univalve, bivalve, sublivalve and multivalve, madrepors, and shapeless remnants of creatures now no longer known, and petrified fish.
That sable globe, rounded like a sea-hedgehog, or a Turk's-head clew, and black as a tarred tackle-block, could be nothing else than the woolly pate of Snowball, the sea-cook! A little beyond were two other objects of dark colour and founded shape; but neither so dark nor so round as that already identified. They must be the heads of the English sailor and Lilly Lalee.
He is sometimes called the Sea-hedgehog or Urchin-fish, and well deserves his name. Many of the Skates or Rays wear terrible spikes. The Thornback is another ugly fellow of this family, having spines on his back and a double row of them down his tail. Fishermen are careful to avoid the lash of this armed tail. The Sting Ray shows us still another weapon.
"Then I consider'd life in all its forms, Of vegetables first, next zoophytes, The tribe that dwells upon the confine strange 'Twixt plants and fish; some are there from their mouth Spit out their progeny, and some that breed, By suckers from their base or tubercles, Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad, Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish, That taken from its element at once Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid; so from these, Through many a tribe of less equivocal life, Dividual or insect, up I ranged, From sentient to percipient, small advance, Next to intelligent, to rational next, So to half spiritual human kind, And what is more, is more than man may know.
Because, once in the narrow place, so many of them could not escape, and it became easy to capture them. Men-Folks do really know a very great deal. It makes me afraid of them. An urchin-fish would make you laugh. Some call it a sea-hedgehog. It looks as if covered all over with great thorns, and a baby sea-urchin looks as if it was all ready to burst, it is so thick and round.
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