86 BRITISH FRESH-WATER FISHES 



his sufferings, took him out of the tank and placed him 

 elsewhere. 



It is a remarkable thing that, whereas the size of most 

 predaceous fish seems to have no defined maximum limit, but 

 depends directly upon the amount of food secured, that of 

 the stickleback remains fixed. Thus, while the pike attains the 

 weight of 25 lb., 30 lb., 40 lb., and even more in well-authenti- 

 cated instances, there are numerous lakes, where the food 

 supply is hmited, where it rarely reaches 10 lb. But in the 

 case of the stickleback, feed it never so generously, it will not 

 much exceed the length of three inches. Mr. Keene mentions 

 that he has seen sticklebacks fall victims to their own voracity, 

 the spines having become entangled in the glutinous substance 

 surrounding frog spawn on which the fish had attempted to 

 make a hearty meal. 



The three-spined stickleback, in its various varieties of 

 form, is very widely spread over the waters of Temperate 

 and Arctic Europe ; and closely allied forms, dis- 

 tinguished dubiously as species, inhabit the waters 

 of Greenland and North America. But none of the genus 

 have been identified in the tropics, nor in the Southern Hemi- 

 sphere. I do not know that this fish is turned to any economic 

 use at the present time in Britain, but Pennant mentions the 

 extraordinary numbers which used to appear in certain years 

 in the river Welland at Spalding, where the peasantry used 

 to scoop them out in millions, and apply them as manure to 

 the land. They used also to boil them for the oil they con- 

 tained, as is done in Sweden and France at this day. Some 

 idea of their abundance may be had from an instance cited by 

 the aforesaid writer, namely, of a man employed by a farmer 

 to collect sticklebacks for manure, who was paid at the rate of 

 one halfpenny per bushel, and earned in the season at the 

 rate of four shillings a day. It has been observed that the 

 stickleback is very scarce in the Thames. It is quite at home 

 in brackish, and even in salt, water. 



