52 NETHER LOCHABER. 



season been common. It is known to ichthyologists as the Raia 

 cJiagrinea, and is not only excellent eating, but from its enormous 

 liver supplies a large quantity of very fine oil, that burns with a 

 clearer and steadier light than that of any other fish with which 

 we are acquainted. We are convinced, by the way, that, used 

 medicinally, it would be found equally efficacious with cod liver 

 oil in all cases where the latter is recommended, whilst its rather 

 agreeable taste and flavour would render it a tolerably palatable 

 dose in its purest and strongest state, which cod oil never becomes, 

 manufacture, and decoct, and clarify it as you may. A very fine 

 specimen of the Chagrinea was caught here about ten days ago. It 

 was cut up and disembowelled before we saw it, but we should 

 guess that its weight when taken off the hook could not have been 

 less than 70 Ibs. All the skates are ugly brutes, and the long-nosed 

 Chagrinea is at once perhaps the ugliest and the best of its tribe. 

 Some people don't eat skate, nor can we say that we are partial to 

 it ourselves, though we once heard a noted gourmand declare that 

 the " wing of a skate was equal to a shoulder of a salmon." We 

 should, for our own part, rather have the salmon. While in Oban 

 about a month ago, an extremely fierce-looking and ugly fish, the 

 name and character whereof not a little puzzled its captors, was 

 brought for our inspection. Luckily for our credit as a naturalist, 

 we had previously seen more than one specimen of the same fish 

 with the St. Andrews fishermen, it being by no means a rare 

 visitor to the eastern and north-eastern shores of Scotland. It was 

 the wolf or cat-fish, closely related to the family of the Gobies 

 (Gobioidce), the Anarrhicas lupus of ichthyologists. The head of 

 this curious and most repulsive-looking fish has some peculiar 

 markings, which, with the fierce glaring eyes and their position in 

 the face, and the formidable array of long, sharp-pointed, recurved 

 teeth, give it much of the expression of an enraged cat, and hence 

 doubtless its common name. For the same reasons, and on account 



