Ii6 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH. 



What are the peculiar characteristics, the essential natural 

 conditions of trouting rivers ? Are they not shallows, sharps, 

 gravels, scours, eddies, mill-races, and every other form and 

 combination of swift-running water from mouth to source? 

 the very antithesis, in short, in every particular of the still, 

 weedy, slow-gliding Thames, with its miles of reed-bed and 

 clay banks, and its interminable ' deeps,' in which nothing but 

 the shadow of the trees seems to have movement ? Now every 

 one who has given much study to questions of pisciculture knows 

 that certain naturally adapted conditions of soil and water are 

 indispensable to the wellbeing of certain kinds of fish as, for 

 instance, to the grayling clay, to the pike weed, and to the trout 

 the class of water I have attempted to describe ; and that you 

 might as well expect to produce a large stock of either of them 

 without such natural adaptation as to cultivate pine-apples at 

 John o' Groat's, or ptarmigan in the plains of Hindostan. I un- 

 hesitatingly assert, therefore, without fear of contradiction, that 

 the Thames is, and always will be whilst it remains cut up into 

 a series of lock ponds, totally and irremediably unfit for a 

 trouting river ; and I challenge the mention of any single 

 instance of an English river analogous to it in which similar 

 results are not found to obtain. The Hampshire Avon, 

 perhaps, in some portions of its course, presents more points of 

 resemblance than any other river with which I am acquainted, the 

 part of locks being performed by a succession of mill-dams and 

 eel-stages, with slow-running, often deep, always weedy reaches 

 between ; and here we find almost identically the same con- 

 ditions as regards fish viz., plenty of pike, and a few large 

 trout. Or I might take the river Lea as probably an equally 

 good instance, and one perhaps better known to Thames 

 fishermen. But go where you will, I believe you will find the 

 rule to be Medo-Persian in its unchangeableness. 



And this brings me naturally to the second point which I 

 have undertaken to prove that even the at-present-existing trout 

 fishing would suffer rather than gain by the deterioration of the 

 j (ike. At present the river contains a fair sprinkling of splendid 



