ANOTHER FISH ARRIVED. 439 



pounds prepared for their reception. They are then salted, 

 some smoked, some roasted and salted, while the markets of 

 Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, and other cities are supplied 

 with fresh ones. The same could be done along a hundred 

 rivers on the Atlantic coast; but we do not yet realize the 

 scarcity of fish. 



QUEER FISHES. 



The estuary catfish is an oviparous abdominal, and one of 

 the recent visitants to our coasts and estuaries from the Ba- 

 hama Banks. The first rays of the dorsal and pectoral fins 

 are rigid ; second dorsal adipose ; head broad, and depressed 

 on the top, with small catfish eyes placed far apart ; long an- 

 tennae ; two distinct nostrils at end of nose, with ear- vents at 

 the side, below the eyes. It is without scales, and its blue 

 back mellows to pink sides and white abdomen. Its colors 

 and brilliant sheen are like the Spanish mackerel's, without 

 its spots. It is leather-mouthed, and the mouth small, armed 

 with a cushion of fine, needle-pointed teeth round the borders 

 of both jaws, showing that it may forage on Crustacea and 

 the inhabitants of the waters generally. An individual 20 

 inches long weighed scant two pounds, and it seldom attains 

 to a greater weight than ten pounds ; and, from its great del- 

 icacy, it resembles both the lady-cat of the Missouri River 

 and the Spanish mackerel of the Atlantic coast. Though 

 generally captured in fykes, it is a bottom-biter to the angle, 

 with menhaden or shedder-crab baits. 



The silure is a native of the River Danube, and, from the 

 high esteem in which it is held throughout Europe as a table 

 luxury, acclimatizers and pisciculturists have introduced it 

 into most of the waters of Germany, some of France, and a 

 few of England. Bertram, in his " Treasures of the Sea," 

 says of the Silurus glanis that its character is rather under 

 a cloud, as its capacious maw has been said to contain the 

 arm and shoulder of a man ; and from the immense weight 

 to which it attains, of from 200 Ibs. to 300 Ibs., and the 



