distinguished; but after all, it is only a convention of our own to count the limbs from before backwards. To inspect a lobster's limbs, we lay it on its back (as Aristotle did), and see the legs overlapping, each hinder one above the one before; the hindmost is the first we see, and the one we must first lift up to inspect the others. Aristotle's account of fishes is a prodigious history of habits, food, migrations, modes of capture, times and ways of spawning, and anatomical details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even illustrate this astonishing Ichthyology. It is not always easy to understand--but the obstacle lies often, I take it, in our own ignorance. The identification of species is not always plain, for here as elsewhere Aristotle did not reckon with a time or place where the familiar words of Greek should be unknown or their homely significance forgotten. Among the great host of fish-names there are several referring, somehow or other, to the Grey Mullet, which puzzle both naturalist and lexicographer. A young officer told me the other day how he had watched an Arab fisherman emptying out his creel of Grey Mullet on some Syrian beach, and the Arab gave four if not five names to as many different kinds, betwixt which my friend could see no difference whatsoever. Had my friend been an ichthyologist he would doubtless have noticed that one had eyelids and the others none; that one had little brushes on its lips, another a small but wide-open slit under the jaw, another a yellow spot on its gill-covers, and so on. The Mullets are a difficult group, but Aristotle, like the Arab fisherman, evidently recognized their fine distinctions and employed the appropriate names. Again, Aristotle speaks of a certain nest-building fish, the 'phycis', and regarding this Cuvier fell into error (where once upon a time I followed him). In Cuvier's time there was but one nest-building fish known such as to suit, apparently, the passage, namely the little black goby; but after Cuvier's day the nest-building habits of the 'wrasses' became known to naturalists, as they had doubtless been known ages before to the fishermen--and to Aristotle. Like almost every other little point on which we happen to touch, we might make this one the starting-point (here comes in the delight and fascination of the interpreter's task!) for other stories.