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 before I can give an unqualified belief to the assertion, I should like to have a few questions answered by Mr. Boccius. Who saw the fish from which those thousands of eggs were extracted at the time this dissection was made? Are the parties who saw these eggs quite certain that the fish was an Eel and not a Lamprey? Who saw the eggs from which Mr. Boccius produced living Eels? Who beside Mr. Boccius ever saw Eel-fry in a pond which had no communication with a river? Will Mr. Allees and Mr. Reed (the gentlemen to whom the spawn was exhibited) say whether the ovary which was shown to them was pretty much of the same form as that of the Lamprey? and if not, in what respect did it differ?