GENERAL DESCRIPTION. 135 



sent day, specimens of this gigantic magnitude are never seen, 

 and seventy pounds may be taken as the limit of their ordinary 

 growth. Even this, however, is a size to which the Sea Salmon 

 has scarcely been known to attain. 



It is a bold, powerful, and tyrannical fish, with which no 

 other inhabiting the same waters can compete. The Grey Suck- 

 ing Carp [Catastomus Hudsonms)^ the Methy, a species of fresh- 

 water Ling [Lota Maculosa), and the Herring-salmon [Coregonus 

 Artedi), form the favourite food of this voracious fish, the stomach 

 of which is constantly crammed with them almost to repletion ; 

 but he will bite ravenously and fiercely at almost anything, from 

 a small fish, or a piece of pork, to a red rag or a bit of bright 

 tin, made to play rapidly through the water. 



In form, he considerably resembles the Common Salmon, 

 though he is perhaps rather deeper in proportion to his length. 

 His head is neat, small, and well-formed, with rather a peculiar 

 depression above the eye, and the snout sharply curved and 

 beak-Uke. The head forms nearly a fourth part of the whole 

 length of the fish ; the skull is more bony than that of the 

 Common Salmon, the snout not cartilaginous, but formed of 

 sohd bone; the jaws are very strong, the upper overlapping, 

 by about half an inch, the lower, which is strongly articulated 

 to the pre-operculum and to the jugal bone. The eye is midway 

 between the snout and the nape, and twice as far from the 

 hinder edge of the gill-cover as from the tip of the snout. 



Of the gill-covers, the pre-operculum is curved or vertical, or 

 nearly so ; the sub-operculum is deeper than in the other Trouts, 

 and is jointed at its inner angle to the operculum and pre-oper- 

 culum, by a slender process concealed by these bones. Its edge 



