GREAT WEEVER. 209 



GREAT WEEVER.* 



I AM not aware that this fish, which is met with 

 occasionally on several parts of the British coast, 

 has ever been recorded as entering rivers. Yet a 

 few years hack a full-sized specimen, now preserved 

 in the Museum of the Cambridge Philosophical 

 Society, was taken in the Ouse a little below Little- 

 port, at a distance from the sea of at least twenty 

 miles. The Ouse is not a tidal river ; the sea-water 

 in general being kept out by the doors of Denver 

 sluice near Downham, and compelled to ascend 

 the Hundred-foot river instead. This renders the 

 circumstance more unlooked-for. It appears, how- 

 ever, that on this occasion the doors of the sluice by 

 some accident were prevented from closing so quickly 

 as usual, in consequence of which a considerable 

 quantity of sea-water was admitted into the river, 

 and with it such fish as happened to be present in 

 the water just at the time. Still the great weever, 

 in this instance, must have freely ascended from the 

 sea as far as the sluice ; and its entering a tidal river 

 at all, is, as far as I know, a new circumstance in its 

 history. 



RIVER BULLHEAD, OR MILLER'S THUMB.f 



THE miller's thumb, when full-grown, is a vora- 

 cious fish, and not always content with " the larvae 



* Trachinus draco, Linn. f Cottus gobio, Linn. 



