NATURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SALMONIDsE. 165 



Thames is, of course, one of the best known, and here fish up 

 to ten pounds or twelve pounds weight are by no means rare. 

 Indeed, I have before me an authentic record of a trout, taken 

 in the Thames, which weighed twenty-three pounds and a half, 

 and which is now, or was some years ago, preserved at the 

 cottage of George Keen, fisherman, of Weybridge. This fish 

 was taken at Shepperton Weir, if I remember rightly, with a 

 spinning bait. At any rate the specimen is, no doubt, still 

 extant to bear testimony in favour of its own authenticity. 

 I have referred to another at Laleham, which weighed twenty- 

 one pounds, and one of sixteen pounds and a half was taken 

 by Mr. John Harris, landlord of the ' Lincoln Arms,' Weybridge, 

 at Laleham, in 1822. 



Many other English waters besides the Thames produce 

 very large trout. I have caught some heavyish specimens 

 myself in the Hampshire Avon, above Ringwood, and at Herd- 

 cott House, near Salisbury, there is preserved the skin of a 

 (rout taken from a tributary running through that town, which 

 weighed twenty-five pounds, and measured four feet two inches 

 and a half in length, its girth being two feet one inch. 



This leviathan is probably the fish alluded to in the ' Trans- 

 actions of the Linnean Society 'as being caught on the nth 

 of January, 1822, in a brook some ten feet wide at the back of 

 Castle Street, Salisbury. Mr. Powell, at the bottom of whose 

 garden it was discovered, placed it in a pond, where it was 

 fed for four months, until it died, when it was found that it 

 had decreased in weight to twenty-one pounds and a qnarter. 



Lord Craven had some years ago a fresh-water trout of 

 seventeen pounds from his stews in Berkshire. The trout had 

 been known in the stew for eight years. In the neighbourhood 

 of Downton on the Avon, a trout was caught with the fly by a 

 Mr. Bailey which weighed fourteen pounds ; and in a small 

 tributary of the Trent, at Drayton Manor, one was taken ex- 

 ceeding in weight twenty-one pounds. A portrait of this fish 

 is still in the possession of the family of the late Sir Robert 

 PeeL A male fresh-water non-migratory trout of thirty pounds 



