to drag them, and even one mentioned by Gillius, weighing four thousand pounds, dwindle into mere minnows and gudgeons. Cruel as all Squali undoubtedly are, reasons perhaps might be suggested, if not wholly exculpatory of their conduct, sufficient to obtain them an acquittal before either a French or an Italian court of judicature. The French verdict would be _meurtre, avec circonstances attenuantes_. An Italian jury would at once pronounce a shark criminal, _arabbiato_—in a passion—consider this sufficient excuse, and summarily dismiss the case. Such lenient judgments might be based on the grounds of their having teeth unusually numerous, efficient, and long; and on temperament; but sharks possess _also_, enormous abdominal viscera; full one-third of the body is occupied with spleen or liver, and the bile and other digestive juices secreted from such an immense apparatus, and poured continually into the stomach, must be enough to stimulate appetite prodigiously, and what hungry animal was ever tender-hearted? We read in the _Anabasis_, that the Greeks would not treat with the Persians about a truce till after dinner; and every one knows that to be the time most propitious to charity and good neighborhood; a hungry man is ever a churl, and _ventre affamé n’a point d’oreilles_. A shark’s appetite is never appeased; for, moreover, in addition to his bilious diathesis, he is not a careful masticator of victuals, but hastily bolts a repast, producing thereby not only the moroseness of indigestion, but a whole host of _tænias_, which goad and irritate the intestine to that degree, that the poor Squalus is sometimes quite beside himself from the torment, and rushes like a blind Polyphemus through the waves in search of any thing to cram down his maw and allay such urgent distress; he does not seek to be cruel, but he is cruelly famished, and must satisfy, not only his own ravenous appetite, but the constant demands of these internal parasites, either with dead or living animals; so, sped as from a catapult, he pounces on a quarry, and gorges, like a boa constrictor, a meal sometimes so great as to press upon and protrude a large portion of the intestine, which, after one of these crapulous repasts, may not unfrequently be seen trailing several feet from the body. It is an interesting fact in the history of sharks—and one by no means without precedent in our own—that violent passions, parasites, and indigestions, do not seem to ruffle the equable current of the blood, and that the pulse continues regular, and averages only sixty beats in a minute. As with us a good digestion, (the common accompaniment of a quiet pulse) may be and often is connected with a bad disposition, who knows but that Heliogabalus and Nero, those admirable human types and representatives of the genus shark in so many other particulars, may have resembled them in this also, and in the midst of their orgies and atrocities have enjoyed a calm circulation.