SPINY FISHES. 235 



are sometimes left dry by the receding tide, being able to 

 exist among the wet sand until the return of the waters. 

 Should the incautious sea-shore naturalist, observing some- 

 thing fish-like half buried at his feet, touch even the tip of 

 its tail, the formidable spine situated on the neck of this 

 creature will be directed, with the utmost rapidity and 

 precision, to the object touching it, and a severe wound 

 inflicted. " On one occasion," says a recent writer, " when 

 a fisherman had laid hold of a weever, which he had taken 

 on a line, the sudden plunge of tlie piercing instrument 

 instantly compelled him to drop his prize; and when, 

 ignorant of the danger, it was grasped successively by two 

 other persons, so great was the agony felt by all of them 

 that they were compelled to leave their fishing and proceed 

 to land in order to procure relief." Even when the fish is 

 dead it requires careful handling; and so in some places in 

 the south of England, where weevers are plentiful, they 

 are not allowed to be brought into the markets for sale 

 until deprived of their spines. 



Spines only less formidable than these, because they 

 are much smaller, are found in all the members of the 

 Stickleback family. This family contains the smallest, and 

 at the same time the most pugnacious, of all the finny 

 tribes ; and in this respect they offer a striking analogy to 

 those tiniest and most combative of the feathered tribes, 

 the humming-birds ; and, like the latter, they often direct 

 their fury against one another. A writer in Loudon's 

 Magazine thus describes one of these fights : — " Having 

 been put into a tub, the sticklebacks," he says, "swim 



