and carefully kept as a delicacy, to make sauce with, &c., until the next year's fishing day comes round.
The waters of West Africa, salt, brackish, and fresh abound with fish, and many kinds are, if properly cooked, excellent eating. For culinary purposes you may divide the fish into sea-fish, lagoon-fish and river-fish; the first division, the sea-fish, are excellent eating, and are in enormous quantities, particularly along the Windward Coast on the Great West African Bank. South of this, at the mouths of the Oil rivers, they fall off, from a culinary standpoint, though scientifically they increase in charm, as you find hereabouts fishes of extremely early types, whose relations have an interesting series of monuments in the shape of fossils, in the sandstone; but if primeval man had to live on them when they were alive together, I am sorry for him, for he might just as well have eaten mud, and better, for then he would not have run the risk of getting choked with bones. On the South-West Coast the culinary value goes up again; there are found quantities of excellent deep-sea fish, and round the mouths of the rivers, shoals of bream and grey mullet.
The lagoon-fish are not particularly good, being as a rule supremely muddy and bony; they have their uses, however, for I am informed that they indicate to Lagos when it may expect an epidemic; to this end they die, in an adjacent lagoon, and float about upon its surface, wrong side up, until decomposition does its work. Their method of prophecy is a sound one, for it demonstrates (a) that the lagoon drinking water is worse than usual; (b) if it is not already fatal they will make it so.
The river-fish of the Gold Coast are better than those of the mud-sewers of the Niger Delta, because the Gold Coast
