The stickleback is a hardy little fish, and can easily be kept in the aquarium, if plenty of room be given to it. It has even been trained to live in seawater, by adding bay-salt to the water in which it dwelt; so that the plan of pickling salmon alive, by a judicious admixture of vinegar and allspice with the water, has something to which to appeal as collateral evidence.
The other representative of the fishes is a very curious one, and can be easily observed. It is called the “Lampern,” and is shown in the accompanying figure.
In some parts of England the lampern goes by the name of “Seven-eyes,” in allusion to the row of eye-like holes that may be seen extending along the side of the throat. These apertures are the openings by which the water passes from the gills.
The chief external peculiarity in this creature is the mouth, which, instead of being formed with jaws like those of other fishes, resembles none of them, not even those of the eel, which it most resembles externally. Indeed, on looking at the mouth of a lampern, one is forcibly reminded of the leech, for it is possessed of no jaws, and adheres firmly to the skin by exhaustion of the air.
Very delicate food are these lamperns, quite as good as the lampreys themselves, whose excellence is reported to have cost England one of her kings; yet I never knew but one person who would eat them, and very few who would even touch them, they also being called poisonous.
In Germany they know better, and not only eat the lamperns themselves, but, packing them up in company with vinegar, bay leaves, and spices, export them as an article of sale.
The solitary sensible individual of whom I have made mention was truly a wise man. He used to offer the young urchins of the neighbourhood a reward for bringing lamperns, at the rate of a halfpenny per wisketful.
A wisket, I may observe, is a kind of shallow basket, made of very broad strips of willow; and a wisket filled with lamperns would be a tolerable load for a boy.
So, for the sum of one halfpenny, that philosopher was furnished with provisions for a day or more.
Really, the prejudice against the lampern is most singular. Even near London, when lamperns lived in vast numbers in the Thames, they were only used as bait, being sold for that purpose to the Dutch fishermen. In one season, four hundred thousand of these creatures have been sold merely for bait for cod-fish and turbot.