58 THE PIKE. 



quieter parts of running streams, and thrives 

 best in great lakes, where food is plentiful and 

 readily procurable. Except that he eschews vege- 

 table matter, and prefers fish to any other kind of 

 food, the pike is simply omnivorous. Fish, flesh, 

 fowl, are alike to him ; the young of his own 

 species, the dace, the gudgeon, the roach, a young 

 duck, a moor-hen, a gaping frog, a bunch of gar- 

 bage all are seized with equal avidity when he is 

 in the humour to feed ; and, to do him justice, it 

 is very rarely that he is not in the humour. A 

 gentleman, who has no wish to communicate his 

 name to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty 

 to Animals, once threw thirty young sparrows and 

 starlings, one after another, to a large pike in a 

 lake, and he seized and swallowed the last with 

 the same avidity as the first. 



No one wishes Mr Buckland success, in his 

 praiseworthy attempt to make the Thames a 

 salmon river, more fervently than myself; but so 

 long as pike exist there in the numbers they do 

 and they will continue to exist in those numbers 

 so long as the Thames flows down to the sea it 

 is simply waste of that pearl of fishes to introduce 

 it to the water for the mere purpose of being 

 swallowed by "Esox Lucius" as it inevitably is 

 within a week of its leaving the breeding-ponds. 



