Sticklebacks are the most voracious little gourmands imaginable, devourers of everything, and cannibals into the bargain; tearing their wounded comrades into fragments, they greedily swallow them. I have often taken this species (_G. concinnus_) in Esquimalt Harbour, where they are very plentiful during the winter months. The natives of Kamtschatka make use of a stickleback (_G. obolarius_), which they obtain in great quantities, not only as food for the sledge-dogs, but for themselves also, by making them into a kind of soup. West of the Rocky Mountains I have never seen the Indians use them as an article of diet, not from any dislike to the fish, but simply because there are larger and better fishes quite as abundant, and as easily procurable. Whether there are any species in the North-west, strictly marine, building their nests in the sea and never entering fresh-water, I am unable to say. The Fifteen-spine Stickleback (_Gasterosteus spinachia_) is along our own coasts strictly a tenant of the ocean, and makes a nest of seaweeds glued together with an adhesive mucus, in the same way as the nests of our little friends are cemented, that seek as their nursery the clear cold streams of British Columbia, Oregon, and Vancouver Island. THE BULLHEAD.—The stickleback has a near relative, with a name nearly as ugly as the owner, ‘_Bullhead_’ being certainly not suggestive of beauty! With such a name, we are the less disappointed to find the entire family of our friends ill-favoured, prickly, hard-skinned, and as uncomfortable to handle as to look at. Plates of scaly armour cover the head, from which sprout sharp spines, like a crop of horns; between these are tubercles that have the appearance of being rivets. The body looks like an appendage, tapering away to a mere nothing at the tail. There are many species frequenting the lakes and rivers of British Columbia, during the summer months, for the purpose of spawning. On their return to the sea, swarms of young bullheads, of various species, regularly follow the ebb and flow of the tide; and in rough weather every breaker, as it rushes up the shelving shingle, carries a freight of tiny fish, that are left struggling amid the pebbles in thousands, to be dragged back and floated out again by the succeeding wave, or to find a last home in the stomachs of the sea-birds.