CHAP. iv. Power of Compression. 53 



mouth as it spun, and thus been able to exert his strength on it ; for had 

 it not been exactly edgewise on, it would have turned and slipped away 

 from his jaw as he pressed it, and thus it would have got flat in his 

 mouth. Probably few fish get a fair bite at a spoon at the very angle 

 of the spoon in the very part of the mouth required to produce such an 

 effect on such a hard substance ; the chances must be much against it, 

 and that would account for the same result not being frequent. But 

 once seen there was no longer room for doubt about the power of the 

 fish ; the spoon was whole and sound when cast in, was cast in deep 

 water clear of rocks, was not run against anything by him, for it was 

 well inside his mouth when I took it out directly he was landed. Had 

 I tried to produce the same effect, it would have required a good 

 downright blow, with a hammer and anvil to help me. I then be- 

 thought me of the spoon of a friend which was thinner than mine, and 

 which was much indented as I had thought at the time by rocks. I 

 bethought me too of the many hooks I had lost unintelligibly ; I knew 

 I had a light hand acquired by killing trout on fine tackle, and yet treble 

 hook after treble hook had been smashed, sometimes before I had felt 

 my fish at all, and some of them had been curled up like a ram's-horn, 

 and curled inwards as from outside pressure, not outwards as from 

 tension. The murder was out; they had been crunched up by the 

 Mahseer's power of compression, and the treble hooks had suffered 

 more than the single, because they had offered resistance, while the 

 single hooks had turned in the mouth and evaded it. On this point, 

 one correspondent asks the question, " How about the teeth inside the 

 gills ? " to which I answer that the Mahseer has no teeth in the gills, and 

 the only teeth he has, those in the throat, could never have got near the 

 spoon, for it is only in the act of swallowing that they can be brought to 

 bear, so as to comminute the food passing down the throat. No, it is 

 to compensate for the absence of teeth in the mouth that the Mahseer 

 has this great power of compression, compression that in an instant 

 squeezes all the life out of the fish preyed upon, and leaves it dead and 

 motionless in the mouth, with no need of teeth to hold it, and so it is 

 passed down the throat head foremost, always head foremost, a small 

 fish not being masticated by the pharyngeal teeth, and only hard sub- 

 stances like molluscs, and the claws and shell of the fresh- water crabs, 

 being comminuted in their passage. These my views on the Mahseer's 

 power of compression have, like not a few others put forward in the 



