148 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [Mar. 13 
city where all shades of transition are found from pure white to 
tawny black. Those who have seen the flashing hordes on the 
spawning beds, in all their glory of color and majesty of action, 
pronounce it a spectacle never to be forgotten. 
Sunapee saibling kept in confinement entirely lose the sexual 
instinct, and with it the wedding garment. So sensitive are the 
females that their removal from the spawning beds to the State 
Hatchery on the opposite shore of the lake, only one mile 
distant, seriously interferes with the maturing process, so that 
it is impossible to secure eggs, the fish having frequently to be 
returned to the water several times during the operation. 
Hence, as far as possible, ripe specimens are selected on the 
natural spawning beds, and there stripped rapidly and returned 
to the lake. Instances are not exceptional in which females 
refuse to part with their eggs and carry them over to the next 
season. This tallies with Cholmondeley-Pennell’s suggestion 
that some of the Windermere charr spawn in alternate years. 
Although a vigorous fighter, the white trout is very easily 
injured, the prick of the hook often being followed by fatal 
consequences, especially in young specimens. Hundreds are 
thus unavoidably killed every summer. In this respect the 
Sunapee charr is very unlike the blue-back of Maine, of which 
Commissioner Stanley said : 
“They are a hardy fish and nearly as tenacious of life as 
the eel or bull-head. I have frequently seen them alive in the 
morning after lying all night on the shore.” 
One other phase of Aureolus life is a marked tendency to 
deformity. Remarkable differences in shape, as well as colora- 
tion, are normal to the quadroons and octoroons of the Sunapee 
spawning beds ; but these differences are sometimes carried to 
the verge of distortion or even monstrosity. Humped backs 
are not infrequent ; but the most repulsive, and at the same 
time most common malformation is the shrinking of the mature 
fish into an eel-like shape, with abdominal respiration and an 
intensely reproachful human look in the cavernous eyes which 
fix your gaze with a mysterious intelligence. The death scene 
of such a fish will haunt one for days, tempting him to specula- 
tion in the field of metempsychosis. 
Professor Garman has proclaimed his belief in the identity 
of the Sunapee, Dan Hole, and Flood’s Pond charrs with the 
Kuropean saibling, and that “the affinities of these forms are 
closer to that saibling by way of an Atlantic steamer than by 
way of Greenland and Iceland.” 
Professor Jordan has said ‘the American charr is probably 
not a distinct species, but native to the waters where it is now 
