COMMON TROUT. 103 



in size and colour; I therefore killed it. The fish is a 

 female, and weighed exactly seven pounds. The accompany- 

 ing schedule will show its gradual increase : 



Date of weighing. 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 



April 1st Olb. 12oz. lib. 12oz. 31b. 4oz. 51b. 4oz. 71b. Ooz. 71b. 4oz- 



October 1st 1 4 205-05 12 78 70 

 Littlecot, Oct. 1840." 



Stephen Oliver the younger, in his agreeable Scenes and 

 Recollections of Fly-fishing, mentions a Trout " taken in 

 the neighbourhood of Great Driffield, in September 1832, 

 which measured thirty-one inches in length, twenty-one in 

 girth, and weighed seventeen pounds." A few years since, 

 a notice was sent to the Linnean Society of a Trout that was 

 caught on the llth of January 1822, in a little stream, ten 

 feet wide, branching from the Avon, at the back of Castle- 

 street, Salisbury. On being taken out of the water, its 

 weight was found to be twenty-five pounds. Mrs. Powell, 

 at the bottom of whose garden the fish was first discovered, 

 placed it in a pond, where it was fed and lived four months, 

 but had decreased in weight at the time of its death to 

 twenty-one pounds and a quarter. 



The age to which Trout may arrive has not been ascer- 

 tained. Mr. Oliver mentions, that in August 1809, " a 

 Trout died which had been for twenty-eight years an inha- 

 bitant of the well at Dumbarton Castle. It had never 

 increased in size from the time of its being put in, when it 

 weighed about a pound ; and had become so tame, that it 

 would receive its food from the hands of the soldiers."" In 

 August 1826, the Westmoreland Advertiser contained a 

 paragraph stating that a Trout had lived fifty-three years 

 in a well in the orchard of Mr. William Mossop, of Board 

 Hall, near Broughton-in-Furness. 



The Thames at various places produces Trout of very 

 large size. Among the best localities may be named Kings- 



