Fish ~ Paperback ~ G B Howes

Excerpt from Fish: In Relation to Their Surroundings Professor Howes said: I imagine that to most of us the word fish suggests a scale-clad creature, to be more or less admired while in the water, to be despatched on removal from it, -withal a none too fortunate animal. Of these scaly fishes there are some eight thousand odd species today inhabiting the globe, and bountiful nature provides them as food for the body and as food for the mind. It is in the latter association that I wish to speak of them to-day, and the gist of a great deal that I have to put before you depends upon what we are to understand by a fish j upon the proof that the fish may be sensitive to immediate change in its environment, and that it may be specially modified in accordance with the conditions of its existence. What, in the first place, are we to understand by a fish. It has long been customary to distinguish so-called water-breathing from air-breathing animals, and while we refer fish to the water-breathing series, we refer creatures which like ourselves live on land to the air-breathing one. When we look a little more closely into the facts however, we find, within the limits of a reservation which I shall put before you, that if free oxygen be withdrawn from the water, life is impossible to the fish; and this is but one way of proving that although the fish lives in water it is dependent upon oxygen for the maintenance of its life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.