THE GRAYLING 



THYMALLUS VULGARIS 

 By the RIGHT HON. SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BART. 



IT has been said, and justly said, that no man should presume to write 

 upon salmon fishing until he has accounted for at least a dozen 

 salmon for every year of his life; nor about trout fishing until he has 

 killed twelve times his own weight with artificial fly. Who am I, 

 then, that I should venture to treat upon that truly game and lovely 

 fish, the grayling ? for although I shall never look again upon the 

 waters from the sunny side of three -score, I cannot claim to have landed 

 more than one hundred grayling, and most of those were unseasonable, 

 being taken when trout fishing, in the months before Thymallus comes to 

 its prime. That is the one defect in the character of a creature otherwise 

 altogether charming — it has acquired the vulgar habit of timing its 

 domestic economy so as to spawn simultaneously with chub and other 

 coarse fish in the spring months; wherefore it does not recover fine 

 condition until after harvest. For this reason the grayling has suffered 

 from an unsympathetic legislature the grievous indignity of being 

 classed among coarse fish under " Mundella's Act " of 1878, which 

 provided a close time for freshwater fish (other than trout or char) from 

 March 15 to June 15 inclusive.* But for this fact, that all through the 

 shining months when the riverside is most attractive, the grayling is 

 tarnished in hue and slimy to the touch — but for that, I say, there would 

 be but one answer, and that an emphatic affirmative, to the question so 

 often disputed, whether grayling should be suffered to exist in good trout 

 streams. We may discuss that point presently: meanwhile — 2l few words 

 about the natural history of the fish. 



The grayling, or umber, as the older writers named it (Thymallus 

 vulgaris), is a true salmonoid, wearing the distinctive badge of that clan 

 — ^the little adipose fin; but it belongs to that group of salmonoids which 

 differs from salmon and trout proper in the structure of the mouth, 

 which is smaller and more suggestive of sucking or sipping than of snatch- 

 ing and biting; and in the teeth, which are smaller and feebler, absent 

 from the tongue and the back of the vomer. The genus Thymallus is most 



This Act applies only to England and Wales, excepting parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, and certain fishery districts 

 have been exempted from it by the exercise of powers conferred upon the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. 



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