Among real fish you will find some of great size. Sturgeon have been caught which weighed five hundred pounds. They were twelve or fourteen feet long. Yet this size seems small when we compare it with that of the great shark which has been found thirty feet long. A queer contrast with such a vast creature is the little minnow, which you catch in ponds and brooks. It is not much over an inch long. Little English boys in their first fishing trips go for sticklebacks, a fish from one to two inches long. I shall tell you in another lesson of this amusing little fish. The fish usually chosen as a type, or model, of the fish race, is a perch. We find fishes[29] differing from the general perch pattern as much as flower differs from flower. The perch is a wedge-shaped fish, and is a beautiful creature. Let us see how others of the fin family differ from the pattern I described to you in the last lesson. Instead of having a clear, round, full, bright eye like that of a perch, some fishes, which live in mud, or in very deep water, have tiny eyes, like dots. Some fishes which live in streams in dark caves have really no eyes. The perch is covered with scales of a rich green-brown and a golden white. Some fish, as the eel and sword-fish, have no scales. A shark has no true scales, but his skin has hardened into little bony points. Some other fish, instead of scales, have large bony plates. The heads and the fins seldom have any scales upon them. If you could see a large collection of fish, you would wonder at the variety of shape. You would see the “perch pattern” changed in almost every possible way. Perhaps the first odd-shaped family to notice would be the rays. The fish of this family are flat. Their bodies are shaped much like a flat triangle, finished with a long slim tail. The ray’s mouth is on the under side of his body. The most common members of the ray family are the skates. They are of a dark color above, and light below. I shall soon tell you a queer thing about skates’ eggs. One of the rays is called the sting ray, because its tail extends in a huge lash, like an immense whip. Another ray is called the eagle, because his body and fins widen out on each side, like the wings of a big bird. Another odd-shaped fin family is that of the flat fish. These, like the rays, are dark above and light below. These fish are very flat or thin in the body, and usually have both eyes and mouth on the upper or dark side. There is one kind where the eyes and mouth are so raised as to look much like the head of a bird. They swim with a queer wave-like motion of the whole body. To this family belong the turbot, flounder, plaice, and sole. Then, too, there is a family of fish that are nearly as round as balls. They have wide stripes of light and dark color, and look more like nice play bells, furnished with tails and fins, than like fish.