Reading the unabridged 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a lot longer than I thought it was. It also has a smattering of Latin, and pages and pages of delightful marine-biology nerding out. Due to translation problems – and as far as I can tell, occasional wholesale alteration of the original French text – it is also occasionally unintelligible. “That day they brought up curious specimens from those productive coasts: fishing frogs that, from their comical movements, have acquired the name of buffoons; black commersons, furnished with antennae; trigger fish, encircled with red bands; orthragorisci, with very subtle venom; some olive-colored lampreys; macrorhynci, covered with silvery scales; trichiuri, the electric power of which is equal to that of the gymnotus and cramp fish: scaly notopteri, with transverse brown bands; greenish cod; several varieties of gobies, etc.; also some larger fish; a caranx with a prominent head a yard long; several fine bonitos, streaked with blue and silver; and three splendid tunnies, which, in spite of the swiftness of their motion, had not escaped the net.”
Gymnotus inaequilabiatus.
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