THE MALE AND FEMALE PARR. 195 



alleged actually to take place ? Simply this j that two 

 bodies disagreeing severally in their nature and gravity, 

 one being a fluid or semi-fluid, having no concentrated 

 form, and not possessed of any redundant weight suffi- 

 cient to overcome that of the element it is presumed to 

 be shed in, the other a solid, consistent as to shape, and 

 remarkable in respect to its heaviness, that these bodies, 

 so different as regards their specific gravity, and not- 

 withstanding the intervention of a resisting and decom- 

 posing medium, like water, approach and come into 

 contact with each other : again, that this contact of the 

 milt with the ova, of a light, creamy mote or particle 

 with a thick husk or shell is impregnation that it ope- 

 rates as having conveyed the vivifying power to the roe- 

 pellets, and that, without such inoculation, these pellets 

 will remain inert and lifeless. Can anything, I repeat, 

 be so utterly absurd as this detail of the process ? yet, 

 if held good of the salmon, it necessarily applies in a 

 question of generation to all known oviparous fishes. 



Now, I put to Mr. Shaw one single interrogatory. Did 

 it never occur to him, in the course of his observations 

 and experiments, to inquire how it happens that the 

 male parr of seven or eight months old, (for I certainly 

 differ from him in the notion that the young of the 

 salmon remain, during the course of two seasons, in the 

 parr state, most unquestionably such is not the case in 

 Tweed or in any other salmon river I am acquainted 

 with, although in the ponds at Drumlanrig, indications 

 of this disposition, the result of confinement may very 

 possibly have presented themselves), is, with regard to 

 its generative secretions, in a greater state of forward- 

 ness than the female fish why, when the one has its 

 roe just developed and the pellets thereof are barely 

 distinguishable to the naked eye, the other possesses its 



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