SALMO HUCHO. 125 



and are caught by the hook. This Trout certainly exists in the 

 large rivers and ponds in the interior, but deteriorate in size. 

 They are brought from New Hampshire in the winter, frozen, 

 for the markets, and from the northern parts of Maine, where 

 specimens have been taken as large as any produced in the 

 great rivers of Europe." 



This passage I quote from the " American Angler's Guide," 

 and I do so, to declare that this fish is, in the first instance, not 

 the Hucho ; and, secondly, to point out that no such fish has 

 ever been authentically produced at all. A Hucho of the Lay- 

 bach, of two feet in length, by eleven inches' girth, and three 

 inches' thickness, was found to weigh four pounds two and a half 

 ounces. Now, fishes increase in weight in the ratio of their 

 breadth and depth, not of their length, a Trout of thirty-one 

 inches weighing seventeen pounds. Whether any Trout or 

 Salmon has ever been taken, of full four feet in length, I greatly 

 doubt. If so, its weight must be enormous : the largest Salmon 

 ever known, the eighty-three pounder, which came into the 

 possession of Mr, Groves, the London fishmonger, in 1821, is 

 described as having been a short fish for the weight, and, I am 

 convinced, would not have measured four feet. 



Now, it remains to inquire what is this fish, which Mr. Smith 

 designates as the Hucho ; and is there any such fish in existence, 

 elsewhere than in that gentleman's imagination ? 



Now, I fear, the answers to these questions must be in the 

 negative, since, most assuredly, there is no scarlet-spotted Trout 

 on record, at all approaching to the size described by Mr. Smith, 

 which we must reckon at the rate of from seventy to one hundred 

 pounds' weight. 



