AwnoruEer Fiso Arriven. 4389 
pounds prepared for their reception. They are then salted, 
some smoked, some roasted and salted, while the markets of 
Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, and other cities are supplied 
with fresh ones. The same could be done along a hundred 
rivers on the Atlantic coast; but we do not yet realize the 
scarcity of fish. 
QUEER FISHES. 
The estuary catfish is an oviparous abdominal, and one of 
the recent vVisitants to our coasts and estuaries from the Ba- 
hama Banks. The first rays of the dorsal and pectoral fins 
are rigid; second dorsal adipose; head broad, and depressed 
on the top, with small catfish eyes placed far apart; long an- 
tenne; two distinct nostrils at end of nose, with ear-vents at 
the side, below the eyes. It is without scales, and its blue 
back mellows to pink sides and white abdomen. Its colors 
and brilliant sheen are like the Spanish mackerel’s, without 
its spots. It is leather-mouthed, and the mouth small, armed 
with a cushion of fine, needle-pointed teeth round the borders 
of both jaws, showing that it may forage on crustucea and 
the inhabitants of the waters generally. An individual 20 
inches long weighed scant two pounds, and it seldom attains 
to a greater weight than ten pounds; and, from its great del- 
icacy, it resembles both the lady-cat of the Missouri River 
and the Spanish mackerel of the Atlantic coast. Though 
generally captured in fykes, it is a bottom-biter to the angle, 
with menhaden or shedder-erab baits. 
The silure is a native of the River Danube, and, from the 
high esteem in which it is held throughout Europe as a table 
luxury, acclimatizers and pisciculturists have introduced it 
into most of the waters of Germany, some of France, and a 
few of England. Bertram, in his “ Treasures of the Sea,” 
says of the Silurus glanis that its character is rather under 
a cloud, as its capacious maw has been said to contain the 
arm and shoulder of a man; and from the immense weight 
to which it attains, of from 200 Ibs. to 300 Ibs., and the 
