1893.] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 1-il 



him for a view be seems long to have privately held, ventured 

 the opinion that many Canadian and Northern Xew England 

 lakes contained a large charr, whose habit of retiring to the 

 deepest and coldest waters throughout the summer and of 

 approaching the surface for a few days only at the end of 

 October explained a general ignorance concerning its very 

 existence. Colonel Hodge's theory received apparent substan- 

 tiation from his accidental discovery in October, 1885, of vast 

 numbers of a mysterious charr spawning on a midlake rocky 

 shoal at Sunapee, He wrote at the time : 



"I can show you an acre of these trout, hundreds of which 

 will weigh from 3 to 8 pounds each. I could never have 

 believed such a sight possible in New Hampshire. The new 

 fish differs from the brook trout in many ways. The females 

 have a brownish back and lemon-colored sides ; the males, a 

 bluish-black back and golden orange sides. The fins are much 

 larger than in the brook trout, and there is an entire absence 

 of the mottling characteristic of the latter fish." 



Thus Colonel Hodge recognized in this graceful high-colored 

 charr, a new variety, and he lost no time in inviting the atten- 

 tion of scientists to the New Hampshire beauty. 



Specimens were forwarded to the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology at Cambridge, Mass., and to Dr. Tarlton H. Bean, 

 Curator of the Department of Fishes, National Museum, only 

 to pronounced at both centres varieties of brook trout. Colonel 

 Hodge resented this classification, and sent Dr. Bean other 

 large specimens of the new fish, together with several Sunapee 

 brook trout, urging a more minute examination. Dr. Bean 

 compared the two forms with special care, changed his opinion, 

 frankly admitted that Colonel Hodge was right, and i>ronounced 

 the Sunapee trout " a Salvelinus of the Oquassa type, but of so 

 enormous a size that at first he did not suspect its i*elation to 

 that species." 



The late Professor Baird inclined to the opinion that it might 

 be a representative of a highly variable Arctic charr found in 

 the Dominion of Canada and Greenland, viz. : The Salvelinus 

 AlpinuH Arcturus. 



A controversy at once arose regarding the origin of this 

 unique trout. Whatever its species, it was a new comer in the 

 opinion of some ; in that of others, a native, the oldest of our 

 charrs, representing the ancestral type and now almost extinct. 

 Those who took the first view were chiefly residents of the 

 immediate region. Such unhesitatingly declared that they had 

 never met with the new fish prior to 1883 or 1884. They 

 regarded the Oquassa (or "Quasky," as it began to be called) 



