196 SALMON. 



take of three days only, and these were sold for one hundred 

 and forty pounds. Mr. Mayhew ("London Labour," etc.) says, 

 hat the quantity of Salmon and Salmon Trout sold at 

 Billingsgate in one year was twenty-nine thousand boxes, 

 with fourteen fish in each box, making four hundred and six 

 thousand fish in all, of the weight of three millions four 

 hundred and eighty thousand pounds. There is little doubt 

 that many of these Trout were sold as Salmon, since so 

 different a fish as the Coalfish has been so sold to an ignorant 

 purchaser. 



The Salmon was not known to the Greeks in ancient times, 

 and is scarcely recognised by Roman writers, by whom 

 generally it appears to have been held in little value, even at 

 a time when luxury reigned to the utmost among them. Pliny 

 mentions it (B. 9, C. 32,) but only as being much esteemed 

 by the people of Aquitania, in Gaul; and yet many of his 

 countrymen must have been long acquainted with it in the 

 rivers of Britain, where they had been peaceably settled from 

 a distant date. Ausonius is the only other Roman writer 

 who mentions the Salmon, which he does in his characteristic 

 poem on the River Moselle, and from whom we learn that 

 the people there were aware of the distinctions which separate 

 some species of the same family, and especially between the 

 Salmo and one which he terms Salar, although modern 

 writers have chosen to consider the names at least as applied 

 to the same fish. The Ancient British name is given in a 

 MS. in the Cotton Library as Ehoe, as also by Pryce in 

 Cornwall, and by Pennant, on the authority of Richard 

 Morris, Esq., Gleisiedyn, Eog and Maran; but although not 

 British, the modern designation is not derived from a Greek 

 or Roman root, and will rather be found in the name of 

 the River Salmona, which passes into the Moselle, where this 

 fish was found in abundance, and from whence perhaps the 

 name was brought into our country by men who had been 

 acquainted with the Salmon in both these regions. That the 

 speci'^s was the same appears from the lines of the poet, a 

 portion of which has been already quoted: 



Nee te puniceo rutilantem viscere Salmo. 



Fish of the bright red flesh, the Salmou called. 



