The growth of these creatures depends greatly on the nature and amount of food, different individuals of the same species exhibiting a large disparity in their dimensions. They grow less rapidly in small ponds or shallow streams, than in large lakes and deep rivers. We once kept a minnow, little more than half an inch long, in a small glass vessel for a period of two years, during which time there was no perceptible increase in its dimensions. Had it continued in its native stream, subjected to the fattening influence of a continuous flow of water, and a consequent increase in the quantity and variety of its natural food, its cubic dimensions would probably have been twenty times greater; yet it must have attained, long prior to the lapse of a couple of years, to the usual period of the adult state. The growth itself seems to continue, under favorable circumstances, for a length of time, and we can scarcely set bounds to, certainly we know not with precision, the utmost range of the specific size of fishes. Salmon sometimes attain a weight of eighty pounds and upwards, and the giant pike of Kaiserslautern is alleged to have measured nineteen feet, and to have weighed 350 pounds. No doubt, an incorrect allegation does not in any way increase the actual size of fishes, and few people now-a-days can take exact cognizance of what was done at Mannheim in the year 1497; but, even in these degenerate days, amid our own translucent waters, and among species in no way remarkable for their ordinary dimensions, we ever and anon meet with ancient individuals which vastly exceed the usual weight and measure of their kind. But, in spite of this, let no angler, whether in the bloom of early youth, the power of matured manhood, or with the silver locks of “hoar antiquity” above his wrinkled brow, ever induce within himself, or express to others, the belief that, at all times and places, he is perpetually catching enormous trouts in vast numbers, because we happen to know that this is not the case. We don’t insist upon any one weighing every fish he captures, but we insist that no one, after jerking out a few pair, will maintain next morning, or even that very night, that he has had a most toilsome but very glorious day, and has killed five dozen and four of the finest trouts the human eye ever gazed upon. “All men are liars”—and several anglers—is a proposition the exact import of which depends much on the mode of construction. THE MUSCULAR MOVEMENTS OF FISHES.