their heads in
between two pebbles, and had their tails sticking up almost
perpendicularly. Yet this was not always the case, as they
sometimes ran nearly out of the water, and it was in this
situation that I observed what I have before mentioned, as I found
it impossible to discover anything that was done by those in
deeper water; for when a female went into such a situation, there
was such a crowd of males rushed to the place that I lost sight of
her in a moment.

I was astonished to find how quickly the eggs were hatched. I
discovered a large shoal spawning on the 11th of May; on the 12th
they were diminished to one-tenth of the number, and on the 14th
(the 13th being Sunday) there was not one left. As I had by no
means satisfied myself on the subject, I felt disappointed that
they had so soon finished their operations, and I took up a
handful of the gravel where they had been spawning, and examined
it with the microscope, to see whether I could discover any ova,
and how they were going on, when to my great surprise I found them
already hatching and some of them already excluded from the egg.
One of them, which I took on the point of a knife, swam briskly
away, and another was the means of pointing out an enemy to me
which I had not previously suspected, and that I had always
hitherto believed to be the prey of and not the preyer upon fish.
The poor Minnow had somehow got fast to the point of the knife,
and in its struggles to free itself it attracted the attention of
a creeper--the larva of one of the aquatic flies called drakes
(_Ephemerae_)--which pounced upon it as fiercely as the water
staphylinus does on the luckless tadpole, but, fortunately for the
Minnow, either the glittering of the knife-blade or the motion of
my hand, scared it away again without its prey.

The young Minnows in this state were quite transparent, except the
eyes, which were disproportionately large; and they seemed to be
perfectly aware that they owed their safety to concealment, as
those that I saw immediately buried themselves in the gravel when
they were set at liberty. (July 27th, 1832.)

* * * * *

EELS.

To the Editor of the "Gardener's Chronicle."

My attention has been called to a paragraph in a Worcester paper
giving an account of a (so-called) discovery by Mr. Boccius, that
Eels are propagated by spawn, like other fish, and that they are
not brought forth alive, as had hitherto been supposed. This may
be true, but befo