two or three days at a time. Like the Diodons, which in some other particulars also they resemble, they have the habit of inflating the body by the inhalation of air until they are as round as a blown bladder; this is supposed to be principally done, when under the excitement of fear or anger. So tenacious of life are they that they have been transported alive from the tropical seas to Holland, where they were sold as high as twelve ducats a-piece.
MM. Cuvier and Valenciennes have, with much labour and skill, distinguished many species of this genus formerly confounded in the Lophius histrio of Bloch. The appropriateness of the appellation histrio, signifying a mountebank, for these fishes, has been misunderstood. It was meant to allude, not to any fancied activity or agility, a quality which they are very far from possessing in general, but to the peculiarity of their coloration, their hues, often diverse and strongly contrasted, being distributed in patches and irregular spots.
Yet some of the species have a certain agility. In the great estuaries that indent the northern coast of Australia, from which the tide ebbs far back in the dry season, leaving them broad flats of mud, there is one of these so abundant, and capable of taking such vigorous leaps, that some voyagers have mistaken them, at first sight, for flocks of birds.
It is doubtless an Antennarius, and perhaps this very species, that is thus described by Mr. Earl, as observed on the coast of Borneo: "Large tracts of mud had been left uncovered by the receding tide, and flocks of gulls and other birds
