JULY 155 



livery of the true salmon, and donning a scarlet raiment 

 before ascending the rivers to spawn. I have no 

 experience of this fine creature, never having fished 

 in rivers north of Trondjhem, and it only is found in 

 sub- Arctic waters ; but Mr. Abel Chapman has given a 

 very attractive description of its sporting qualities in 

 his Wild Norway, and Gtinther writes of specimens 

 attaining a length of four feet. This, however, is in 

 excess of any authentic record which I have found, 

 though in Lake Wetter it has been taken 2 feet long 

 and weighing 17 Ib., 1 the average weight being aboul 

 4 Ib. These fish betoken their hereditary association 

 with Arctic conditions by shunning the powerful sun of 

 a Scandinavian summer, for they remain in water 

 twenty or thirty fathoms deep until the coolness of the 

 declining year summons them to shallower banks to 

 deposit their spawn. 



Compared with the fine Scandinavian char, their 

 British and Irish relatives exhibit the characteristics 

 of a dwindling and deteriorate race, which Gtinther 

 arranged in five distinct species, 2 but such elaborate 

 classification will not stand. The occurrence of char 

 in a very small percentage of lakes in the British Isles, 

 and their strict segregation for thousands of years, 

 prohibiting all admixture of different colonies, are 

 quite enough to account for some variation in colour, 

 form, and even structure among fish of a single species 

 inhabiting widely separated sheets of water. Especially 

 is this the case with members of so exceedingly plastic 

 a genus as Salmo. Char from different lakes do not 



1 Op. cit., p. 842. 2 Study of Fishes (1880), pp. 645-6. 



