182 OPINIONS UPON PARR. [< HAI-. v. 



resided near a salmon river used not unfrequently, after filling 

 the family frying-pan, to feed their pigs with the dainty little 

 fish ! Countless thousands were annually killed by juvenile 

 anglers, and even so lately as twenty years ago it never occur- 

 red either to country gentlemen or their farmers that these 

 parr were young salmon. Indeed, the young of the salmon, as 

 then recognised, was only known as a smolt or smout. Parr 

 were thought, as I have already said, to be distinct fish of the 

 minor or dwarf kind. Some large-headed anglers, however, 

 had their doubts about the little parr, and naturalists found 



PARR ONE YEAR OLD. 

 Half the natural size. 



it difficult to procure specimens of the fish with ova or milt 

 in them. Dr. Knox, the anatomist, asserted that the parr 

 was a hybrid belonging to no particular species of fish, but a 

 mixture of many ; and it is curious enough that although 

 this fish was declared over and over again to be a separate 

 species, no one ever found a female parr containing roe. The 

 universal exclamation of naturalists for many a long year 

 was always : It is a quite distinct species, and not the young 

 of any larger fish. The above drawing represents a parr, the 

 engraving being exactly half the size of life. 



This " distinct-species " dogma might have been still pre- 

 valent, had not the question been taken in hand and solved 

 by practical men. Before mentioning the experiments of Shaw 

 and Young, it will be curious to note the varieties of opinion 

 which were evoked during the parr controversy, which lias 

 existed in one shape or another for something like two him- 



