The female sun-fish (called, I believe, in England, the roach or bream) makes a "hatchery" for her eggs in this wise. Selecting a spot near the banks of the numerous lakes in which this region abounds, and where the water is about 4 inches deep, and still, she builds, with her tail and snout, a circular embankment 3 inches in height and 2 thick. The circle, which is as perfect a one as could be formed with mathematical instruments, is usually a foot and a half in diameter; and at one side of this circular wall an opening is left by the fish of just sufficient width to admit her body, thus: [Illustration] The mother sun-fish, having now built or provided her "hatchery," deposits her spawn within the circular inclosure, and mounts guard at the entrance until the fry are hatched out and are sufficiently large to take charge of themselves. As the embankment, moreover, is built up to the surface of the water, no enemy can very easily obtain an entrance within the inclosure from the top; while there being only one entrance, the fish is able, with comparative ease, to keep out all intruders. I have, as I say, noticed this beautiful instinct of the sun-fish for the perpetuity of her species more particularly in the lakes of this region; but doubtless the same habit is common to these fish in other waters. William L. Stone. Jersey City Heights, N.J. * * * * * ANCIENT LAKE DWELLINGS. Among the many traces which man has left of his existence in long past ages on the face of the earth, says a correspondent of the _Scotsman_, none are more interesting and instructive than the lake dwellings of Switzerland and other countries, which have been discovered within the last fifty years or so. Although these relics of the past are far more modern than those which we referred to in a late article on "Primeval Man," and are probably included within the range of Egyptian and other chronologies, yet they stretch far beyond the historic period, so far as Europe is concerned, and throw a flood of light on the habits of our ancestors, or at any rate predecessors, in these regions. We are tolerably well acquainted with the history of the Jews when David worked his way up from the shepherd's staff to the royal scepter, or when Joshua drove out the Canaanites and took possession of their land, but of what was going on in Europe in these times we have hitherto had no knowledge whatever. These lake dwellings, however, were in all probability inhabited by human beings somewhere about the time when the events we have referred to took place, and may have been inhabited before the earlier of them.