Pike are occasionally taken in the English lakes above 30 pounds in weight, and Dr. Grierson mentions one killed in Loch Ken, in Galloway, which weighed 61 pounds. The color of the young fish is of a greenish hue, but it afterward becomes rather of a dusky olive brown upon the upper parts, marked on the sides with mottled green and yellow, and silvery white on the abdomen. We do not think highly of its flesh, although by many it is held in some esteem. * * * * * REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. _“Mercedes of Castile,” a Romance, by J. Fennimore Cooper. 2 vols. Lea & Blanchard, 1840._ As a history, this work is invaluable: as a novel, it is well nigh worthless. The author deserves credit for presenting to the public, in a readable form, so much historical information, with which, otherwise, the great mass of the community would have never become acquainted; and he ought, also, to receive proper commendation for having woven that information in any way whatever, into the narrative of a novel; but at the same time, if called upon to speak of his work as a romance, and not as a history, we can neither disguise from ourselves, nor from our readers, that it is, if possible, the worst novel ever penned by Mr. Cooper. A hasty sketch of the plot will fully sustain our assertion. The work opens with the marriage of Isabella of Castile, and Ferdinand of Arragon, after which a _hiatus_ occurs of more than twenty-two years. This, in the first place, is a grand error in the novelist. Had he commenced his narrative at the siege of Granada at once, we should have been spared an ungainly excrescence on the very front of the story. We shall, therefore, consider the novel as beginning properly at an ensuing chapter.