SECTION IX. 



TROUTS WITH REFERENCE TO THE SALMON-FISHERY. 



Des hommes sans loi, et sans regie certaine, faisant tout par leur volonte et par 

 leur CAPRICE. MONTESQUIEU. 



THE trout is classed by Linnaeus as a species of the genus 

 Salmo : and as each salmon river has its own peculiar breed of 

 salmon, so has each river, and stream, and lake, in which 

 trouts are bred, its own variety of trout. If strangers to the 

 salmon-fishery wonder that each salmon river should have a 

 distinct variety of salmon, or each herring loch or bank, where 

 herrings are bred, a distinct variety of the herring species, 

 their wonder or scepticism must, we think, cease, when they 

 find that even each trout stream, and river, and lake, not 

 only in Great Britain, but, as Sir H. Davy remarks, in Europe, 

 and, we doubt not, in the world, which are so infinitely greater 

 in number than the salmon rivers, possesses a different breed 

 of trout, varying from each other in size, shape, colour, quality, 

 and flavour, and weighing, from the little trout in the streamlet 

 to the great lake trout, as Sir H. Davy states, from less than 

 half an ounce to sixty pounds so boundless, as we before 

 remarked, are the varieties in the works of Nature. 



The quantities of trout produced in the Tweed, and in many 

 of the Scotch rivers, particularly the Spey, are very great. In 

 the river Ness many weigh from ten to fifteen pounds and 

 trout have been caught in the river Shinn, in Sutherlandshire, 

 which weighed thirty pounds. Some of these large trouts can 

 only be distinguished from salmon by experienced fishermen. 

 Formerly, when salmon were sold at a penny and three half- 



