Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
Skates and rays of a more or less modern type, and ancestral gar-pikes and sturgeons, enter the arena. Their superiority in organisation soon makes itself felt, and they enter upon the rapid evolution which will, by the next period, give them the first place in the fish world. Over the whole Mesozoic world, therefore, we find advance and the promise of greater advance.
The boy was always interested in the big fish which were often caught, and when they were sometimes tethered in the shallow water near the Anchorage he felt sorry for the poor creatures. "I wonder if they mind it," he once remarked to the captain. "Do you suppose they think of their little baby sturgeons, and how they are getting along?"
"Sponges, oysters, crabs, sturgeons, clams, toads, snakes, lizards, skunks, opossums, ant-eaters, baboons, negroes, wood-chucks, lions, Esquimaux, sloths, hogs, Hottentots, ourang-outangs, men and monikins, are, beyond a question, all animals.
Undoubtedly it was one of these "sturgeons of a vast bignesse" that, according to the legend, swallowed both Hiawatha and his canoe. We are now in Hiawatha's country, and we are constantly reminded by Radisson's descriptions of passages in Longfellow's beautiful poem.
On the east of this province is the city of Matriga , where the Tanais flows into the Pontus, by a mouth of twelve miles wide . Before this river enters the Euxine, it forms itself into a sea towards the north, of seven hundred miles in length and breadth, but in no place above six paces deep, so that it is not navigable for large vessels: For which reason, the merchants of Constantinople, when they arrive at the city of Matriga, send their barks to the Tanais, where they purchase dried fish, sturgeons, thosas, barbels, and many other sorts of fish.
Therefore they are not alltogether ashamed to shew us all, to intice us, and inanimate the men to defend themselves valliantly and come and injoy them. In two dayes we arrived att the River of the sturgeon, so called because of the great quantity of sturgeons that we tooke there. Here we weare to make our provissions to passe the lake some 14 dayes.
At midday or in the evening I visited the most noted traktirs, and made the acquaintance of the caviar, sturgeons, sterlets, and other native delicacies for which these institutions are famous deafened the while by the deep tones of the colossal barrel-organ, out of all proportion to the size of the room; and in order to see how the common people spent their evenings I looked in at some of the more modest traktirs, and gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, at the enormous quantity of weak tea which the inmates consumed.
From Athos and Suhum I went to Poti; the River Rion, renowned for its valley and its sturgeons, is close by. The vegetation is luxuriant. All the streets are planted with poplars. Batum is a big commercial and military, foreign-looking, cafe'-chantant sort of town; you feel in it at every step that we have conquered the Turks. Particularly fine is the road to Kars and the swift river Tchoraksu.
The Summer passed away with admiration by the diversity of the nations that we saw, as for the beauty of the shore of that sweet sea. Heere we saw fishes of divers, some like the sturgeons & have a kind of slice att the end of their nose some 3 fingers broad in the end and 2 onely neere the nose, and some 8 thumbs long, all marbled of a blakish collor.
The Ledil or Wolga is a large and very broad river, which discharges itself into the Sea of Baku, or the Caspian, twenty-five Italian miles below Astracan; and both this river and the Caspian, which is tolerably salt, contain innumerable quantities of fish called tunnies and sturgeons.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking