CHAPTER XVI 
THE COMMON TROUT 
The Common or Brown Trout—Its Variability—Doubtful Permanence of 
So-called Species—Food of Trout—Trout-fishing. 
The Common or Brown Trout (Sa/mo faric) 
FIns. TEETH. 
As in the salmon. As in the salmon. 
THE name “trout” seems to have had an origin in the 
term applied to fish in general by primitive man. The Greek 
TpwKTys Means a gnawer, a nibbler, a greedy creature, from 
Tpwyew, to gnaw, and was applied to some kind of marine fish 
with sharp teeth ; from the Greek probably came the Latin 
tructa and the French ¢rvite, but we derive our form of the 
word through a different channel, for it appears in Anglo- 
Saxon as fruht. It is aterm well fitted by its root meaning to 
denote a fish so insatiably predaceous as our brown trout is by 
nature, albeit long and painful experience of the malice of man 
has rendered it shy and suspicious. The most incorrigible 
human gourmand might learn to be abstemious if the dangers 
lurking in too frequent calipash and calipee and too copious 
draughts of Perrier Jouet took the tangible form of barbed 
steel, instead of the more subtle and even deadlier agencies 
of dyspepsia and uric acid. 
Professor Seeley tabulates no fewer than twenty-four 
species of fresh-water trout in Europe, besides five migratory 
species, but the extreme variability of the whole race of trout 
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