FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 estate. There are some deepish pools in this burn, which also feeds and 

 traverses a milldam much frequented by goodly trout, and I had hopes that 

 the requirements of Thymallus might there be satisfied. Not a bit of it ! A few 

 days later word was brought me that some strange fishes had been found 

 floating belly -upwards in the harbour. These proved to be my poor grayling, 

 which, thoroughly disapproving of the quarters provided for them, had 

 made a clean bolt of it, and committed suicide in the salt water. 



It is difficult — ^nay, impossible — ^to define the original limits of distri- 

 bution of the grayling as a British fish, so completely have these been 

 obscured by its importation into rivers where it was not indigenous. There 

 is a tradition that it was brought to England by monkish pisciculturists; 

 and no doubt we may owe its presence in some English waters to the 

 industry and enterprise of mediaeval celibates; but I incline to trace its 

 presence in English waters to a far higher antiquity, namely, to that 

 geological period when the Trent, the Yorkshire Ouse, the Wharfe and the 

 rivers of East Anglia were tributaries of the mighty Rhine as it wound its 

 way towards the Arctic Ocean through the vast plain now covered by the 

 North Sea. It is in these easterly -flowing streams of Yorkshire and Derby- 

 shire that we have most reason to regard the grayling as indigenous. 



Nobody knew Yorkshire waters and their contents better than Mr T. E. 

 Pritt who, in his "Book of the Grayling" (1888), wrote as follows: "With 

 the exception of the Hodder, a tributary of the Ribble, and the Wenning, 

 a tributary of the Lune, grayling are found in all the main rivers of York- 

 shire, and in most of their larger tributaries." Now, as the Ribble and 

 the Lune are the only rivers of Yorkshire and Derbyshire that flow to the 

 west (the Mersey, which rises in the extreme south-west of Yorkshire, 

 being now negligible as a fish -producing stream), grayling appear to 

 be indigenous only in the eastern-flowing waters of these counties, in 

 which case it seems probable that they trace their descent from a remote 

 Rhenish ancestry. If they have disappeared from the Nen, the Ouse of 

 Norfolk, and the other sluggish rivers of East Anglia, that is easily ac- 

 counted for by the abundance of pike in those waters. 



That opens the question why grayling do not appear to have ever been 

 indigenous in the Thames system; for the general belief of geologists is 

 that the Thames also was formerly a tributary of the Rhine. It is inter- 

 esting to remember that the late Sir Andrew Ramsay expressed a different 

 view in his "Physical Geology of Great Britain" (1863). He therein 

 maintained that the Severn valley was one of the oldest in southern 

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