444 Mr. W. Thompson’s Notes on British Char. 
this does not appear, but all have the two or three first rays 
and their connecting membrane dusky, and the remainder 
red, and ofa deeper hue than on any part of the body: anal fin 
partaking at its base of the colour of the part of the body to 
which it is attached, dusky towards the tip ; white margin to 
the first ray in some of the brighter-coloured specimens only : 
caudal fin gray, of different shades in all; in the brightest in- 
dividual varied with red, which appears at the base of the 
Jower lobe. 
The males are generally more gracefully formed than the 
females, and most of them rather brighter in colour, but there 
is no external character so strikingly different as to lead to a 
certain knowledge of the sex ; some of the largest finned are 
females—in the Loch Grannoch Char the males had much 
the larger fins, and the sex was as unerringly distinguished 
by the colour as by the form, the accuracy of the distinction 
in both cases being established by dissection. Both sexes of 
the Lough Melvin fish represent the Welsh Char. 
The colour of the flesh when boiled was rather pale, be- 
tween the “sienna yellow” and “ flesh-red” of Syme’s No- 
menclature of Colours; no difference of colour in that of the 
sexes. ‘The milt and roe were in these specimens ready for 
exclusion. The ova severally reckoned from a fish 11 inches 
in length, and which had not shed any, were 959 in number, 
and of a pale yellowish colour—the ova generally, though 
equally mature, were lighter coloured than in the Loch 
Grannoch Char; they were of the same size, 2 lines in dia- 
meter, 
The remains of food were found in only one out of the twelve 
specimens, and appeared to be a portion of the case of a cad- 
dis-worm. The vertebrze, as reckoned in two specimens, male 
and female, were 60 in number*. 
Lord Cole informs me that this fish is called “ Freshwater 
Herring” at Lough Melvin, though in the same part of the 
country the term “Char” is applied to the more ordinary 
state of the species as taken in other lakes. Its differing 
from the so-called Char, in being an insipid bad fish for the 
table, and pale in the flesh, is the chief reason of its being 
considered distinct from it. It will, however, be seen in the 
following pages, that the term “ Freshwater Herring” is ap- 
plied to the Char of several of the lakes in Connaught, and 
from one of which an example before me is identical with the 
fish of the English lakes. Examples of the Lough Melvin 
* The vertebre reckoned in a male and female of the Loch Grannoch fish 
were in the former 60, and in the latter 62 or 63—this must be considered 
an accidental variation. 
