THE ZooLoGist—APRIL, 1876. 4855 
which it is impossible to read without feelings of the deepest 
interest. 
“ Referring to Mr. Lee’s report upon the salmon, the ‘Field’ 
newspaper has indicated the desirability of gaining a similar 
intimate knowledge of the life-history of the ‘whitebait.’ The 
furthest step, I believe, in this direction, but towards which there 
are yet some few links wanting, lave been achieved by myself at 
the Manchester Aquarium, the only institution of the kind where 
this fish, as whitebait, has up to the present time been permanently 
established. As is already generally recognised, this whitebait is not, 
sui generis, a distinct species of fish, as formerly described, but, as 
proved by Dr. Albert Giinther, of the British Museum, the young 
or fry of the herring (Clupea harengus), which, in this young or 
‘whitebait’ stage, visits the estuaries and shallow waters generally 
around our coasts. During the summer and autumn of the year 1874 
several hundreds of these little fish were imported to Manchester- 
by me from Mr. J. S. Parry Evans’s salmon weirs at Colwyn Bay, 
North Wales, a distance of some seventy miles. A number of these 
are still in a flourishing condition, and have, during the eighteen 
months or more of their captivity, grown, in the most favourable 
instances, to fully half the size of a full-grown herring, with which 
species there is now no gainsaying their identity. In the open sea, 
where the supply of food is much more varied and abundant, and 
the fish is not submitted to the artificial conditions inseparable 
from an aquarium, it may be predicated that the growth is even 
more rapid, and that from two to three years is at the outside the 
total length of time required for the development of a newly- 
hatched whitebait into an adult herring. In the ‘ Handbook to the 
Crystal Palace Aquarium’ it is stated that these fish (herrings) have 
not been kept at all at that institution, and that the failure cannot 
be accounted for by reference to any known cause, as also that it 
has not been shown yet that the species can be maintained for any 
but comparatively short periods in any aquarium yet devised. 
This last statement should certainly have been altered or excised 
in the present edition, herrings having been among the most inte- 
resting fish permanently on exhibition at the Brighton Aquarium 
for many years past, while at Manchester they have, in their 
younger stage, thriven equally. The causes operating against the 
maintenance of these fish at the Crystal Palace, again, are surely 
not so occult as to justify Mr. Lloyd in altogether despairing of 
