Oddities in the way of curious fishes can receive no better illustration than that afforded by the very curious “telescope-fishes” of China. These beautiful little fishes are kept alive in many of our large aquaria. At first sight the telescope-fishes might be mistaken for the familiar gold-fishes, but a cursory inspection of their appearance at once shows the peculiarities of structure which have earned for these creatures their distinctive name. The eyes are seen to be singularly prominent, and protrude from the head to a marked extent, while they also present certain alterations in intimate structure. The fins, moreover, are double, this conformation being well exemplified in the large and prominent tail-fin. The exact nature of these fishes has been discussed by the French Academy of Sciences, in the records of which it is stated that the Chinese have cultivated these fishes from an ordinary species of the carp race, and that the peculiar conformation of the eyes results from a diseased state, which, by being transmitted from one generation to another, has become at last a stable and definite character of the animals. This very probable explanation of the origin of these peculiar eyes is supported by the fact that certain carps inhabiting the canal Saint Martin at Paris were found to possess prominent eyes; and a like appearance has been observed in carps living in rivers into which the water of drains had been allowed to flow. WONDERS OF THE SHORE --CHARLES KINGSLEY See, on the shore, a shell bed, quite large, but comely enough to please any eye. What a variety of colors and forms are there, amid the purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder-weed, and tangle (ore-weed they call it in the south), and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the only English flowering plant which grows beneath the sea). What are they all? What are the long, white razors? What are the delicate green-gray cimeters? What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squirrels’ tails and lobsters’ horns, and tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and vegetable forms? What are the groups of gray bladders, with something like a little bud at the tip? What are the hundreds of little pink-striped pears? What those tiny babies’ heads covered with gray prickles instead of hair? The great red star-fish, which the Ulster children call “the bad man’s hands”; and the great whelks, which the youth of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red capsicums? Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling wildly over each other, rattling about the huge mahogany cockles, as big as a child’s two fists, out of which they are protruded? Mark them well, for you will perhaps never see them again.