The Zoologist — September, 1873. 3675 



scenes are rarely witnessed, and only revealed to those who have 

 an unlimited allotment of time and patience : I have seen a male 

 seize a female by the small of the back, by which I mean that 

 slender part of the body which succeeds the last dorsal fin and 

 precedes the caudal fin ; and sometimes also by ihe sharp spike or 

 spine which we call the ventral fin, and having thus seized her he 

 seems disposed to say by force, not by words, " Come into my 

 bower;" but these scenes are not understood: as I have already 

 said, we know next to nothing of the loves of the fishes, and only 

 imagine them by the results. As to the period required by the 

 eggs in coming to maturity, we have evidence of a rather partial 

 kind: "Mr. Gratton had a fine brood hatched in fourteen or fifteen 

 days, the nest having been formed immediately after the intro- 

 duction of the fish." This is the only record I possess. 



These little fishes are wondrous creatures when they first assume 

 the parental figure ; they look like spicules of silver or bright motes 

 in sunshine, as they float in your aquarium : no one seeing them 

 for the first time, and without the aid of a magnifier, could imagine 

 them to be fishes : then as to number ; we are accustomed to count 

 the spawn of fishes by thousands and hundreds of thousands, but 

 1 think this is not the case with sticklebacks ; I have taken some 

 pains to ascertain, and have concluded that the average number of 

 a brood does not exceed twenty : I have never couuted more than 

 fourteen. But I admit they may be more numerous : I have caught 

 hundreds of these atomic fishes in my water-net, but then I know 

 not how many broods composed the school. 



One word more : in 1843 Mr. Frederick Holme, then at Oxford, 

 published (Zool. 200) his account of keeping water-beetles in 

 confinement: no description of the prison-house is attempted, but 

 Mr. Holme speaks of it as a "glass": he says of his prisoners, 

 " They speedily become familiarized to a certain extent, and will 

 follow the finger round the glass in expectation of food." He 

 continued his observations during summer and winter for a long 

 period. " When I kept a pair together," thus he continues, 

 " I always found the male died first, and that his dead body had 

 generally been mutilated and pretty nearly devoured by his widow. 

 The females were at all times much more voracious than the males. 

 I generally fed them with raw beef, of which they sucked the juices, 

 but in summer I sometimes supplied them with small aquatic 

 insects, which they seized with their fore feet and tore to pieces 



