3-074-649 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Odd fish at the International Fisheries Exhibition, 1883. 'Angelfish, West Indies; Chital, India; Old Wife Filefish, West Indies; Bow Fish, America; Wallagoatta, India; Threadfish, West Indies; Sea Porcupine or Globe Fish, China; Schnapper or Red Bream, New South Wales; Rabbit Fish, America; Spotted Wry Fish, America; old Perch, English; Swordfish, India; Butterfly Blenny; Unnamed, India; Parrot Fish, China; front view of Lutianni, India; Caranx Gallew, India; Lobster, England; Octopus, England; John Dory, England; Tessellala, India; Myhrhakir Maculata, India; Gamala, India...the octopus [is not] a fish, but a mollusc of the "cephalopod" or head-footed class, and supposed to be a great enemy of the lobster, whose shell it can easily break with its hard crooked beak after catching hold of it with the eight long flexible arms, furnished with a hundred and twenty pairs of tenacious suckers. Mr. Henry Lee's treatise on the octopus...has considerably modified the exaggerated popular notion of its powers, which had been magnified by Victor Hugo's romantic fancy in his "Travailleurs de la Mer" ; but it is a fact that one nearly killed a man diving at Melbourne in 1879, and was only beaten off with an iron bar after twenty minutes' desperate combat'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.