the tail of the animal till it is just on the point of ripening into life. Salmon eggs deposited early in the season, when the temperature is high, come sooner to life than those spawned in mid-winter: indeed there is a difference of as much as fifty days between those deposited in September and those spawned in December, the one requiring ninety days, the other one hundred and forty days to ripen into life. Salmon have been brought to life in sixty days at Huningue; but the quickest hatching ever accomplished at the Stormontfield breeding-ponds was when the fish came to life in one hundred and twenty days. I have endeavoured to illustrate these early stages of fish life by a drawing, which shows the eggs at about their natural size, as also the advance of the fish in size and shape. [Illustration: EGGS OF THE SALMON KIND JUST HATCHING.] At the salmon-ponds of Stormontfield the eggs laid down the first season were hatched in one hundred and twenty-eight days, but the eggs of other fish have been known to come to life a great deal sooner. The usual time for the hatching of salmon eggs in our northern rivers is one hundred and thirty days, or between four and five months, according to the openness or severity of the season. When at last the infant animal bursts from the shell, it is a clumsy, unbalanced, tiny thing, having attached to it the remains of the parental egg, which hamper its movements; but after all, the remains of its little prison are exceedingly useful, as for a space of about thirty days the young salmon cannot obtain other nourishment than what is afforded by this umbilical bag. [Illustration: SALMON A DAY OR TWO OLD.] We cannot, unfortunately, obtain a sight of the ripening eggs of any of our sea fish at a time when they would prove useful to us. No one, so far as I know, has seen the young herring burst from its shell under such advantageous circumstances as we can view the salmon ova; but I have seen the bottled-up spawn of that fish just after it had ripened into life, the infant animal being remarkably like a fragment of cotton thread that had fallen into the water: it moved about with great agility, but required the aid of a microscope to make out that it was a thing endowed with life. Who could suppose, while examining those wavy floating threads, that in a few months afterwards they would be grown into beautiful fish, with a mechanism of bones to bind their flesh together, scales to protect their body, and fins to guide them in the water? But young herring cannot be long bottled up for observation, or be kept in an artificial atmosphere; for in that condition they die almost before there is time to see them live; and when in the sea there are no means of tracing them, because they are speedily lost in an immensity of water.