The yellow-billed sprat, {102} for instance, is usually so poisonous that 'death has occurred from eating it in many cases immediately, and in some recorded instances even before the fish was swallowed.' Yet a species caught with this, and only differing from it (if indeed it be distinct) by having a yellow spot instead of a black one on the gill-cover, is harmless.

Mr.Hill attributes the poisonous quality, in many cases, to the foul food which the fish get from coral reefs, such as the Formigas bank, midway between Cuba, Hayti, and Jamaica, where, as you 'approach it from the east, you find the cheering blandness of the sea-breeze suddenly changing to the nauseating smell of a fish- market.' There, as off similar reefs in the Bahamas and round Anegada, as we'll as at one end of St.Kitts, the fish are said to be all poisonous.

If this theory be correct, the absence of coral reefs round Trinidad may help to account for the fact stated by Mr. Joseph, that poisonous fish are unknown in that island.

The statement, however, is somewhat too broadly made; for the Chouf- chouf, {103a} a prickly fish which blows itself out like a bladder, and which may be seen hanging in many a sailor's cottage in England, is as evil-disposed in Trinidad as elsewhere.

The very vultures will not eat it; and while I was in the island a family of Coolies, in spite of warning, contrived to kill themselves with the nasty vermin: the only one who had wit enough to refuse it being an idiot boy.
These islands of the Bocas, three in number, are some two miles long each, and some eight hundred to one thousand feet in height; at least, so say the surveyors.