190 THE RIDDLE OF THE BURBOT 



English rivers, is remarkable ; because, assuming that 

 the Thames was connected with the Rhine system 

 simultaneously with the Trent, etc., it would seem 

 inevitable that a fish inhabiting every other part of 

 that system would be found in the Thames also. 



Unluckily the case has been obscured by the blunder 

 of a printer's reader more than three hundred years 

 ago, giving rise to the belief that the Thames did 

 contain burbot at the end of the sixteenth century. A 

 single passage in Leonard Mascall's JBooke of Fishing 

 with Hooke and Line (1590) has been quoted over and 

 over again in evidence thereof. I have done so my- 

 self 1 before I discovered the mistake. In discoursing 

 about the fishes of the Fen district, Mascall has the 

 following : 



'There is a kind of fish in Holand [that is, the south- 

 eastern district of Lincolnshire] in the fennes beside Peter- 

 borrow, which they call a poult ; they be like in making and 

 greatness to the whiting, but of the cullour of the loch 

 [loach]; they come forth of the fennes brookes into the 

 rivers nigh there about, as in Wandsworth river there are 

 many of them.' 



Now the 'Wandsworth river' has been naturally 

 taken to mean the Wandle, which flows into the 

 Thames at Wandsworth ; whence the assumption was 

 easy that, although there are no burbot in either 

 Thames or Wandle now, they were there three hundred 

 years ago. But on reading the above quoted passage 

 carefully, it appears evident that Mascall was writing 

 only of the waters ' in the fennes beside Peterborrow.' 



1 British Freshwater Fish (1904), p. 91. 



