Alphabet of angling Author:James Rennie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Even carp however likes animal food, and will devour small eels, frog-spawn, and the roe or the young of fishes, including its own species, as well as water inse... more »cts, which are the staple food of every sort of fish from the minnow to the salmon, every thing that lives and moves being swallowed without, so far as we can find, any discrimination of species or much nicety of selection. textit{Smell in Fishes. Smelling in land animals is immediately connected with breathing, and we cannot easily conceive how smell is produced except by a current of air, in which odoriferous particles are diffused, passing through a moistened channel, as was first so admirably described by Schneider two hundred years ago; but in fishes which do not breathe, smell cannot be thus produced, though there can be no doubt of their being endowed with this sense. Water, indeed, is as good a medium for diffusing odours as air, and there is the less necessity for a current of this being produced through the nostrils, as fish move about so constantly through the water. Their nostrils, therefore, are in general large, but imperforate backwards; that is, they do not communicate with the throat, but in some fishes, such as the rays and the sharks, the nostril opens by a considerable chink into the mouth, and through this a current of water may probably run. M. Dumeril and the Rev. W. B. Daniell think, that, from the structure of the nostril, and the want of an aerial medium for odours, fishes cannot smell at all, and that theirnostrils perform a function similar to taste; but to me this supposition seems gratuitous and improbable, and it tends strongly to disprove the opinion, that experienced anglers find certain strongly smelling substances in the form of pastes excellent for enticing fish to their baits. ...« less