1870.] MISCELLANEOUS. 465 



them, but properly the speckled goby), shads, flounders, and 

 lamperns. It will be of interest if I note the contents of the 

 stomach of one of the whitebait I opened, which was about 

 five inches in length. The greedy fellow had devoured twenty- 

 one squilla3 or ' mantis crabs,' and three small shrimps. So 

 far so good. Now it may be asked what I have to adduce in 

 support of my assertion that a whitebait is a whitebait. They 

 are not young shads certainly, for the shad we cauo-ht 

 could as easily be picked out from amongst the ' bait ' as a pio- 

 from a flock of sheep. And this applies with equal force as 

 a regards the sprat. If they be young herrings how comes it that 

 great proportion of the ' bait ' caught had only just escaped from 

 the egg ? Surely no one believes that herrings have just spawned 

 in the muddy Thames? And if they have not, whence come these 

 baby herrings, if such they be ? Is is impossible to believe that 

 fish so young and fragile could have made their way up the 

 Thames as high as Greenhithe from the sea. Hence the fair 

 deduction is that they were hatched from the egg near where they 

 were caught. Granting this then they are most assuredly not young 

 herrings, but the young of mature whitebait that had spawned 

 early in the year. My experience, acquired ' aboard ' the white- 

 bait boat^ has but the more firmly convinced me that the whitebait 

 is a distinct species, entitled to its name ((7. alha), and not the 

 young of the herring, or any other fish.— J. K. Lord, in The 

 Leisure Hour. 



A New Species op Erythronium, by Professor Asa 

 Gray.-— Ordinarily it is hardly worth while to make a separate 

 article for a single new species of plant, even when discovered in a 

 district in which a new flowering plant is unexpected. But the 

 species. of Erythronium are so few, and the present one is so pecu- 

 liar, and its habitat so closely bordering the region included in my 

 Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, that I need 

 not apologize for bringing it at once to notice. 



The specimens before me, accompanied by a colored drawing- 

 are just received from Miss S. P. Darlington (a daughter of the 

 late Dr. Darlington, long the Nestor of American botanists and 

 one of the best of men), and were collected at Faribault, Minne- 

 sota, by Mrs. Mary B. Hedges, the teacher of Botany in St. 

 Mary's Hall, a school of which Miss Darlington is Principal. 



The flower is much smaller than that of any other known spe- 



