ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Craft of Water and Land Animals 30 Which are the most crafty, water-animals or those creatures that breed upon the land?, Plutarch; served verbatim
The fish amiae, which are another sort of tunnies, are so called, because they swim in shoals, as also the pelamydes or summer whitings. As for the rest that are seen to swim in shoals and to observe a mutual society, their number is not to be expressed. And therefore let us proceed to those that observe a kind of private and particular society one with another. Among which is the pinoteras of Chrysippus, upon which he has expended so much ink, that he gives it the precedency in all his books, both physical and ethical. For Chrysippus never knew the spongotera, for he would not have passed it over out of negligence. The pinoteras is so called, from watching the fish called pina or the nacre, and in shape resembles a crab; and cohabiting with the nacre, he sits like a porter at his shellside, which he lets continually to stand wide open until he spies some small fishes gotten within it, such as they are wont to take for their food. Then entering the shell, he nips the flesh of the nacre, to give him notice to shut his shell; which being done, they feed together within the fortification upon the common prey. The sponge is governed by a certain little creature more like a spider than a crab. For the sponge wants neither soul nor sense nor blood; but growing to the stones, as many other things do, it has a peculiar motion from itself and to itself, which nevertheless stands in need as it were of a monitor or instructor. For being otherwise of a substance loose and open, and full of holes and hollowness, by reason of the sloth and stupidity of it the sponge-watcher assists to give notice when any thing of food enters the cavities of it, at which time the sponge contracts itself and falls to feeding. But if a man approach and touch it, being nipped and admonished by the sponge-watcher, it seems to shudder and shut up the body of it, closing and condensing it in such a manner as makes it no easy thing to cut it from the place where it grows. The purple shellfish also, called porphyrae, clustering together in a kind of mutual society, build up little combs for themselves like bees, wherein they are said to generate; and culling out the choicest substance of the moss and seaweed that stick to their shells, they seem to be in a circular commons among themselves, feeding the one upon the other’s nourishment.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Chrysippus — a candidate entry

Which are the most crafty, water-animals or those creatures that breed upon the land?, Plutarch — translated by John Philips> (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)