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distinction of species. Even the gilleroo trout of Ireland, whose stomach is 

 unlike that of any other of the salmonidse (being thickened into a substance 

 resembling the gizzard of a fowl), has still the fifty-six vertebrae of the common 

 trout, and is clearly nothing else. It has been imagined, and with great proba- 

 bility, that the thickening and hardening of the stomach is an accommodation of 

 nature to the peculiarity of the food, which is found to be, almost exclusively, 

 small crustaceous animals ; and we are too well satisfied of the adaptability of 

 the animal frame to circumstances to consider this as anything very remarkable. 



The largest common river trout of which I have ever heard was taken in a 

 small stream branching from the Avon, at Salisbury, in 1822. Its weight was 

 twenty-five pounds. 



Deformities are not common among fishes. But there is one curious mal- 

 formation in the trout — the upper jaw is much shortened, and very obtuse. There 

 is a specimen of one, thus imperfect, in the Museum of the Zoological Society ; 

 and in 1852 the Rev. Mr. Hill caught one in the Wye, which he kindly gave to 

 me. I intended it for the Museum of the Philosophical Institution of Hereford ; 

 but have never been able to recover it from the hands of the party who was to 

 preserve it. As I have said already, that higher classes, in their earlier stage, 

 pass through the forms of their inferiors ; this shortened upper jaw of the trout is 

 an example of an arrest in its progress to the perfect state, at a point which marks 

 the completed organization of the lamprey — a grade preceding the bony fishes. 

 What is always permanent in the lower animals, becomes occasionally so in the 

 higher, and is then a deformity. 



Though Ichthyological monstrosities are rare, the trout is by no means a 

 .solitary instance. The perch has been taken with the back greatly elevated, and 

 the tail contorted. It is so found in some of the lakes of the North of Europe, as 

 well as in Llyn Raithlyn, jSIerionethshire ; and I once took one, thus deformed, 

 in a small brook in Picardj'. Another very remarkable malformation has been 

 noticed in both the perch and the carp ; a female roe on one side, and a male roe 

 on the other side of the same fish. 



The grayling is the only other of the salmon family which claims to be a 

 Herefordshire fish ; and considering its beautiful shape, the sport it affords, its 

 excellence as an edible, and its best season being in the autumn and winter, when 

 the rest of its genus are out of condition, it is extraordinary it should not be more 

 wdely disseminated. In the Monnow, for instance, where though trout are 

 abundant, they are of poor quality, I imagine the grayling would flourish ; for it 

 delights in rivers with a gravelly bottom, and an alternation of gentle stream and 

 pool— the smallness of all its fins, except the dorsal, depriving it of power to stem 

 a heavy and rapid water. 



The mouth of this fish is so formed — the upper lip projecting considerably 

 beyond the lower — that in rising at insects it is compelled to turn on its back ; 

 yet with such celerity is this movement accomplished, that it formerly received 

 the name of umber, from umhra, a shadow. With the exception of the salmon, I 



