“fishes,” as Professor Owen observes, “perish when taken out of water, chiefly by the cohesion and desiccation of their fine vascular branchial processes, through which the blood is thereby prevented from passing.”[1] Some fishes, as the Mackerel and Herring, are dead almost in an instant after exposure to the air; others, as the Eel and Flat-fishes, survive a long time: in the former, the gill-openings are enormously large, in the latter, they are very small. “The power of existing long out of water depends chiefly on mechanical modifications for detaining a quantity of that element in the branchial sacs,” and this is readily effected when the gill-aperture is small, for, “if sufficient water can be retained to keep the gill-plates floating, the oxygen which is consumed by the capillary branchial circulation is
- ↑ Lectures on Comp. Anat. ii. 260.
