flavour would render it a tolerably palatable dose in its purest and strongest state, which cod oil never becomes, manufacture, and decoct, and clarify it as you may. A very fine specimen of the Chagrinea was caught here about ten days ago. It was cut up and disembowelled before we saw it, but we should guess that its weight when taken off the hook could not have been less than 70 lbs. All the skates are ugly brutes, and the long-nosed Chagrinea is at once perhaps the ugliest and the best of its tribe. Some people don't eat skate, nor can we say that we are partial to it ourselves, though we once heard a noted gourmand declare that the "wing of a skate was equal to a shoulder of a salmon." We should, for our own part, rather have the salmon. While in Oban about a month ago, an extremely fierce-looking and ugly fish, the name and character whereof not a little puzzled its captors, was brought for our inspection. Luckily for our credit as a naturalist, we had previously seen more than one specimen of the same fish with the St. Andrews fishermen, it being by no means a rare visitor to the eastern and north-eastern shores of Scotland. It was the wolf or cat-fish, closely related to the family of the Gobies (Gobioidæ), the Anarrhicas lupus of ichthyologists. The head of this curious and most repulsive-looking fish has some peculiar markings, which, with the fierce glaring eyes and their position in the face, and the formidable array of long, sharp-pointed, recurved teeth, give it much of the expression of an enraged cat, and hence doubtless its common name. For the same reasons, and on account probably of its character as a fierce, relentless tyrant among more amiable and less powerful fish, it is known among the Channel Islands and along the coasts of England as the wolf-fish. The only fish at all approaching it in ugliness and repulsiveness of features is the better-known angler or fishing-frog (Lophius piscatorius), which also, by the way, is not so common of late years on our western coasts as it used to be. CHAPTER X. Birds--Contest between a Heron and an Eel. With the exception of a slight drizzle on Saturday the last ten days have been wonderfully fine for the season [February 1870]. Seldom, indeed, have we been so near realising the "ethereal mildness" of Thomson's "Spring" so early in the year. And, in sooth, it was high time that some such pleasant change in the weather should take place, for no living wight can remember anything so incessant and persistent as were the rain and the storm of the previous six weeks. "When frost and snow come both together, Then sit by the fire and save shoe leather,"