In the corridor was a little trough of water and at the bottom a kind of rag, flabby and gray, with black rings on the back.

This animal always attracted the immediate curiosity of the visitors.

Everybody would ask for it.
Groups of countrymen, city families preceded by their offspring, pairs of soldiers, all might be seen consulting before it and experimenting, advancing their hands over the trough with a certain hesitation.
Finally they would touch the living rag at the bottom,--the gelatinous flesh of the fish-torpedo,--receiving a series of electric shocks which quickly made them loosen their prey, laughing and raising the other hand to their jerking arms.
Ulysses on reaching the fish tanks had the sensation of a traveler who, after having lived among inferior humanity, encounters beings that are almost of his own race.
There was the oceanic aristocracy, the fish free as the sea, swift, undulating and slippery, like the waves.

They all had accompanied him for many years, appearing in the transparencies opened by the prow of his vessel.
They were vigorous and therefore had no neck,--the most fragile and delicate portion of terrestrial organism,--making them more like the bull, the elephant and all the battering animals.

They needed to be light, and in order to be so had dispensed with the rigid and hard shell of the crustacean that prevents motion, preferring the coat of mail covered with scales, which expands and contracts, yields to the blow but is not injured.