262 BRITISH FRESH-WATER FISHES 
in weight? Or I will ask him to accompany me to Romsey 
on the Test. There he shall see under a bridge below the 
town a deep pool, just within the park of Broadlands, whence 
every year are taken one or two enormous trout, apparently 
identical with the so-called ferox of Loch Treig and other 
Highland lakes. Now in the Test there is no question of 
a different species. These Romsey monsters were once modest 
little parr-marked brook-trout. Favoured by fortune or 
superior mettle, they have happened to take up their abode 
in this pool below the bridge, where they thrive prodigiously 
on the offal which comes to them abundantly from one of the 
town sewers. Like ferox, they disdain the artificial fly, but 
seize a prawn, a minnow, or even a good lob-worm dangled 
conveniently before their noses. I have seen one so taken 
in this pool weighing 113 1b.; as I write I have before my 
eyes the stuffed skin of another which weighed 8 lb., as well 
as that of a third of 6 lb., which took my floating sedge in 
most gentlemanly manner in a shallower pool a little way down 
the same river. 
Now, any one of these trout, had it been taken with a 
minnow in profound Loch Treig, would have been hailed as 
Salmo ferox. In a lake not five-and-twenty miles in a crow- 
flight from Loch Treig—Loch Arkaig, to wit—I once went 
afloat at 3 p.m., and returned at seven with five trout, 
weighing respectively 17} lb., 8 lb., 5 lb., 22 lb., and 2 |b. 
Having been taken by a spinning-bait, a small burn-trout, 
they were all indubitable ferox, of course; but who would 
have so termed the three smaller fish had they been taken 
with the fly? 
Again, if Salmo ferox is a distinct species, how are the 
young and adolescent forms to be distinguished from the 
common trout of any lake? Nobody has ever attempted to 
point that out; yet it is surely incumbent upon those who 
claim these great trout as a separate species to explain what 
they are like before they become great. The simplest expla- 
