PREFACE 



It may, I think, be gathered from the general conversation of one's 

 friends who are anglers, and, indeed, from much that one finds in the 

 literature of angling, that considerably less is definitely known regarding 

 the sea-trout than is popularly known nowadays regarding the salmon. 

 The truth is, that the salmon has, until very recently, practically 

 monopolised the serious attention of investigators of the life-history of 

 our more sporting fishes. 



I do not of course mean to say that the sea-trout has hitherto been 

 wholly neglected. Much useful and interesting information regarding 

 it may be found scattered here and there in the pages of books on fish 

 and fishing, but I do not know of any recent work which bears to be 

 primarily a study of the gamest of fishes. 



Dr. Francis Day, in his " British and Irish Salmonidae," published 

 in 1887, gave us perhaps the most exhaustive study of the sea-trout that 

 has yet been written, and, more recently, Mr. C. Tate Regan, in his 

 excellent treatise on " The Freshwater Fishes of the British Isles," 

 published in 191 1, emphasised some of the more striking of Dr. Day's 

 views. But Dr. Day, when he wrote, was not in a position to take 

 any very great advantage of such evidence as we know can be 

 gleaned from a study of the scales of the Salmonidae, and he had not 

 before him, when he wrote, such definite data as we now know can be 

 gathered from the systematic marking of individual fish. Both of these 

 lines of inquiry, as I hope to show, help to shed a clearer light upon 

 much that is obscure, or that rests merely upon theory, in the 

 life-history of the sea-trout, and it is, I think, on the evidence that will 

 be obtained from further investigation along these lines that a complete 



