160 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE 



the top waters of its petty tributaries must at 

 one time have followed a course not much lower 

 than theirs. It is lower to-day because its cutting 

 and transporting power has been greater. Scot- 

 land, as one of our greatest geologists has put it, 

 once existed as a low dome with a very gentle 

 rise from its circumference to its crown of not 

 more than one in a hundred. Its existing diver- 

 sified features have been sculptured out of the 

 dome by the action of its streams. But the 

 sculpturing has been a very slow process, and 

 if we are to get the trout from the streams to 

 the hill lochs by harking back to the time when 

 the connection between them was gradual and 

 easy, we shall almost certainly reach a time before 

 the trout, as trout, existed. 



In such a case a breath of the perfectly com- 

 monplace is refreshing. Talking with an intelligent 

 gamekeeper, I asked him how he accounted for 

 the trout in a certain loch lying in a depression 

 thirteen hundred feet up a western ben. " Very 

 easily," he replied. '* Thirty years ago there were 

 no trout in that loch. The hill was then under 

 sheep, and a shepherd named Duncan Matheson 

 occupied a shieling beside the loch. He was very 

 fond of fishing, and had the idea of putting fish 

 into it. So he caught a number out of the burn 

 in the glen and carried them up in a pail." The 

 only thing about it that struck him as strange was 

 that, whereas the burn trout are a dark brown 

 and rarely exceed four ounces in weight, their 

 descendants in the loch frequently run over the 

 half-pound, and are a finely-coloured breed. 



