Few excursions can be proposed more acceptable to young folks than going
a-fishing, and perhaps the most delightful sort of fishing is to be had
by accompanying some old fisherman out into the broad ocean.
There are many circumstances that contribute to make a day's sport of
this kind more enjoyable than pond or river fishing, and not the least
of these consists in the wonderful variety of the creatures to be
caught.
In our inland streams and lakes in any given locality the kinds of fish
to be caught are well known, and, comparatively speaking, there are not
many different sorts; but in ocean fishing the oldest fisherman, and
those most accustomed to the sorts of fish generally found in their
fishing grounds, every once in a while happen upon creatures the likes
of which have seldom, perhaps never, been seen before. Only a short time
since a Nantucket fisherman, rowing slowly along, buried the prow of his
boat in some partly yielding substance that brought him to a
stand-still. Somewhat startled, he went forward, oar in hand, to find
his little craft imbedded in the body of an enormous jelly-fish, the
largest ever seen. The soft and yielding body of the creature offered so
little resistance to his oar when he tried to push off, and he saw
himself so hopelessly entangled in the mass of slime and tentacles,
that, instead of attempting to free himself, he determined to tow it
ashore, which he did by passing a sail-cloth under its body and rowing
slowly homeward.
[Illustration: THE CAPTURE.]
Of course the rough encounter with the boat had considerably mutilated
the jelly-fish, and torn away portions of the long thread-like processes
or tentacles that hang from the central mass; yet these, when the
creature was laid along the sand of the ocean beach, measured over two
hundred feet in length, and it is conjectured that, uninjured and
stretched to their utmost length, they could not have been less than
three hundred feet long. The great shield-like body of the animal was
found to be over nine feet in diameter, two feet more than the largest
heretofore known, which is described by Professor Agassiz, who measured
it while it was floating lazily on the surface of the water. This
specimen was so large that the professor feared his account of it might
be considered exaggerated.
The monster when alive looks as much as anything like an immense
circular plate or dish of glass floating bottom upward on the sea. The
color of the body is a brownish-red, with a rather broad margin of
creamy white edged with blue, while the tentacles--pink, blue, brown,
and purple--hang like skeins of colored glass threads from the under
parts of the shield. Very beautiful are these threads, glistening with a
silky lustre beneath the waves, but they are extremely dangerous, too.
Each of these threads, in fact, contains myriads of cells, in each one
of which is coiled up, ready to be darted forth on contact with any
living substance, a whip-like lance finer than the finest cambric
needle. Millions of these stings entering at once cause a sensation like
that of a violent electric shock, paralyzing and often killing the
creature with which they come in contact.
[Illustration: HYDROID FROM WHICH THE JELLY-FISH GROWS.]
This gigantic creature grows from the small one, called a hydroid,
represented in the small cut. You see the hydroid does not in the least
resemble a jelly-fish. Perhaps the strangest thing about these wonderful
lumps of animated jelly is that their young are not jelly-fishes at all,
but an entirely different sort of animals. Sometimes they take the shape
of a pile of platters, which finally separate and become individual
jelly-fish; sometimes they grow into living plants which bear eggs like
fruit, which eggs hatch and finally become jelly-fish. No fairy tale can
afford instances of transformations so surprising as do these
animals--more like animated bubbles than anything else to which they can
be compared; transparent and exhibiting the most brilliant colors, they
dissolve away when stranded so completely that no trace of their
substance seems to remain.
[Illustration: THE FIRST DROP OF BITTERNESS.]