The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 208: CHAP. 21.—WHY FISHES LEAP ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE WATER.

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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 21.—WHY FISHES LEAP ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE WATER.

There is a little animal,2364 in appearance like a scorpion, and of the size of a spider.2365 This creature, by means of its sting, attaches itself below the fin to the tunny and the fish known as the sword-fish 2366 and which often exceeds the dolphin in magnitude, and causes it such excruciating pain, that it will often leap on board of a ship even. Fish will also do the same at other times, when in dread of the violence of other fish, and mullets more especially, which are of such extraordinary swiftness, that they will sometimes leap over a ship, if lying crosswise.