3670 The Zoologist — September, 1873, 



have left no record of their doings except in the memories of their 

 survivors. 



Our stickleback doings at that early period not only engrossed 

 the attention of the little company of aquarians who met at 

 Mr. Bowerbank's hospitable mansion on a Monday evening, but 

 attracted the notice of an outside public, to which they were the 

 never-failing source of pleasantry : very refreshing was that in- 

 cessant fusillade of small jokes to those who fired them, and very 

 harmless to those who received them. Even the "inimitable" 

 author of the 'Pickwick Papers,' whom nothing amusing, or 

 ludicrous, or note-worthy, or instructive, ever escaped, took the 

 tide of this little mania on the flood, and rendered Hampstead 

 Heath and its ponds and its sticklebacks immortal in his pages. 

 Mr. Pickwick is described as the author of a paper intituled 

 " Speculations on the Source of Hampstead Ponds, with some 

 Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats," and the Club of which 

 he was the enlightened President sent forth that eminent man to 

 make further researches. The author adds, " There sat the man 

 who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, 

 and agitated the world with his Theory of Tittlebats, as calm and 

 unmoved as the deep waters of the one on a frosty day or a 

 solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen 

 jar." This shows that the new fancy had taken so deep a hold on 

 the public mind that it was worthy of good-humoured banter by a 

 man who never fought with shadows. 



It was not until the year 1842 that the nest-building talents of the 

 stickleback were fully revealed to the world, and then it was another 

 species of stickleback, Gasterosteus spinachia, through another 

 medium of observation (the open sea), and another hand (that 

 of R. Q. Couch) that held the pen (Zool. 796). Mr. Couch, like his 

 predecessors, has passed ^way , but unlike them has left a trace of his 

 handywork which will endure as long as Ichthyology is a science. 



Again, Mr. Kinahan, addressing the Dublin Natural History 

 Society, years afterwards, observes of Gasterosteus leiurus, "Con- 

 cerning the manner in which this little fish preserves its spawn not 

 the slightest notice, if I may judge from the silence of our latest 

 authorities, has been taken by any naturalist." Alas ! that it 

 should have been so ; yet numbers of us, 1 can positively assert, 

 were as intimately acquainted with the facts which Mr. Kinahan 

 recorded (Zool. 3626) as he could possibly have been. 



