Trout and Salmon 179 



but at the moment the Atlantic salmon and the Canadian 

 Kamloops are still almost the same fish, and all the evolu- 

 tionary steps are for once visible to us at the same time.^ 



To return to our United States and its partition between 

 the eastern brook trout in the east and the rainbow-cutthroat 

 in the west, that division no longer holds. You can no longer 

 tell, from the fish that you take out of the water, whether 

 you are angling in Vermont or in California j you may get 

 eastern brook, rainbow, or European brown in either, or you 

 may take all three fish out of the same stream. It is man 

 who has altered the situation, and while he has made some 

 mistakes in the way of unnecessary adulterations of native 

 stock, he has on the whole been moving in the right direction. 

 For the great lament that has been going up all over the 

 country about the passing of the wild trout is not without 

 foundation. Gasoline is easy to tax and gasoline taxes go into 

 roads. Roads are being built into the most inaccessible cor- 

 ners of our land, and where roads go automobiles go, and 

 where automobiles go fishermen go. And so the regions 

 where wild trout still hold their own are being invaded, and 

 there is no escape from the fact that eventually the greater 

 part of the country will be reduced to the condition in 

 which the thickly settled middle Atlantic states already find 

 themselves. There each season's fishing strips the popular 

 streams bare. Hardly a fish is left at spawning-time to pro- 

 duce another generation. If it were not for the state and 

 Federal hatcheries, there would be few trout and little 

 trout-fishing. 



For their natural spawning, most trouts seek gravel beds 

 in the shallow reaches of swiftly flowing streams. Instinctively 

 they move against the current in their search for such regions, 



^The only constant anatomical character by which the Atlantic salmon 

 can be distinguished from the trout of the rainbow-steelhead series is the 

 shape of one small bone lying deep within the skull. 



