1 66 SALMON AND TROUT. 



weight, from Lough Neagh, Ireland, was cooked at Brooks's 

 Club, in October 1832. It was beautifully spotted, and its 

 flesh of good colour and flavour. The length of this fish was 

 forty inches, and its girth twenty-four inches. 



But here the difficulty above alluded to in distinguishing 

 between the specimens of the Salmo fario and the Salmo ferox 

 occurs, and in the absence of scientific verification leaves it in 

 doubt to which of the two species this monster trout may have 

 really belonged. 



This confusion appears to extend sometimes even to the 

 salmon, for, when I was last at Staines, there was at the Swan 

 Inn, a picture of a huge Thames trout which was taken at 

 Shepperton, by Mr. George Marshall, of Brewer Street, London, 

 on the 3rd of October, 1812, with a single-gut line and no 

 landing net ; weight twenty-one pounds. The following was 

 the subscription : ' A Thames Salmon \ ' The picture, which 

 was not badly done, represents all the usual characteristics of 

 a large Thames trout, except the tail, which was drawn square 

 at the end ; from the age of the fish I should naturally have 

 expected it to have been round. . . . Possibly this Thames 

 trout had not eaten enough whitebait to develop aldermanic 

 proportions. 



The trout is very rapidly affected by the nature of its food, 

 as is well known to those who have compared the flesh of trout 

 after and before the ' May fly season.' Some interesting ex- 

 periments, by Mr. Stoddart, made in order to ascertain the 

 relative fish nourishment to be extracted from different descrip- 

 tions of food, have been put on record. The trout to be 

 experimented upon were put in three separate tanks, and in 

 one the fish were fed daily upon worms, in another upon live 

 minnows, and in the third upon flies of various kinds. The 

 result was, that the fish fed on the worms grew slowly, and had 

 a lean appearance those dieted upon minnows became much 

 larger, whilst such as were fattened wholly upon flies attained in 

 a short space of time extraordinary dimensions, weighing twice 

 as much as both the others put together the bulk of food eaten 



