1893. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. > 141 
him for a view he seems long to have privately held, ventured 
the opinion that many Canadian and Northern New 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 : 
“JT 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, urgivg a more minute examination. Dr. Bean 
compared the two forms with special care, changed his opinion, 
frankly admitted that Colonel Hodge was right, and pronounced 
the Sunapee trout ‘‘a Salvelinus of the Oquassa type, but of so 
enormous a size that at first he did not suspect its relation 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 
Alpinus 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) 
