THE BURBOT gt 
which varies according to locality from November till March. 
When engaged in reproduction, burbots assemble in numbers 
and lie closely intertwined with each other at the bottom 
of the water. 
The burbot is very widely distributed over Central and 
Northern Europe and North America, extending from the 
north of Italy to Sweden, and, according to Yarrell, as far east 
as India. But in England it is so very local as to suggest some 
curious speculation. How comes it that a robust and prolific 
fish which is at home in the Trent is absent from the Thames, 
which geologists hold to be the older river, once a tributary of 
the Rhine, where burbots abound? Mr. Keene, indeed, states 
that he once took one (he does not say how) from the Wey, 
near Weybridge, weighing half a pound ; but he adds that 
none of the people in that neighbourhood had ever seen 
a fish of the kind before. The occurrence of a single 
individual of a species could only be accounted for by 
supposing that it had made its way through canals into the 
Thames watershed; but there is evidence to prove that the 
burbot once was indigenous to the Thames and its tributaries. 
Mascall, already referred to as the author of the Booke of 
Fishing with Hooke and Line (1590), has the following interest- 
ing note about this fish : 
“There is a kind of fish in Holand,* in the fennes beside 
Peterborrow, which they call a poult ; they be like in making 
and greatness to the whiting,t but of the cullour of the loch 
[loach] ; they come forth of the fennes brookes, into the rivers 
nigh there about, as in Wandsworth rivert there are many of 
them. . . . They are taken at milles in welles [eel-baskets], 
and at waters [weirs] likewise. They are a pleasant meate, and 
* Not the kingdom of Holland, but the south-eastern division of 
Lincolnshire which bears this name. 
7 A true analogy ; the whiting, like the burbot, belonging to the Cod 
Family. 
+ The Wandle, which falls into the Thames at Wandsworth. 
