100 AMERICAN FISHES. 



deteriorate in size. They are brought from New Hampshire in the 

 winter, frozsn, for the markets, and from the northern parts of Maine, 

 where specimens have been taken as large as any produced in the 

 great rivers of Europe." 



This passage I quote from the " American Angler's Guide," and 1 

 do so, to declare that this fish is, in the first instance, not the Hucho ; 

 and, secondly, to point out that no such fish has ever been authenti- 

 cally produced at all. A Hucho of the Laybach, of two feet in 

 length, by eleven inches girth, and three inches thickness, was found 

 to weigh four pounds two and a half ounces. Now, fishes increase in 

 weight in the ratio of their breadth and depth, not of their length, a 

 Trout of thirty-one inches weighing seventeen pounds. Whether any 

 Trout or Salmon has ever been taken of full four foot in length 1 

 greatly doubt. If so, its weight must be enormous ; the largest Salmon 

 ever known, the eighty-three pounder, which came into the possession 

 of Mr. Groves, the London fishmonger, in 1821, is described as having 

 been a short fish for the weight, and I am convinced would not have 

 measured four feet. 



Now it remains to inquire what is this fish which Mr. Smith desig- 

 nates as the Hucho ; and is there any such fish in existence elsewhere 

 than in that gentleman's imagination ? 



Now I fear the answers to these questions must be in the negative, 

 since, most assuredly, there is no scarlet-spotted Trout on record at 

 all approaching to the size described by Mr. Smith, which we must 

 reckon at the rate of from seventy to one hundred pounds weight. 



The Salmo Amethystus, Mackinaw Salmon, which does grow to 

 that prodigious size, and which answers to many of the particulars 

 specified, is never scarlet-spotted, nor does the Salmo Confinis of Dr. 

 Dekay ever show a red spot. 



One or both these fish do exist in the lakes of Maine and New 

 Hampshire, from Temiscouata to Winnepisiogee, and it may be that 

 this is a mis-description of one of these. If it be not, it is either a 

 new and nondescript fish, of the kind mentioned as killed by the Pre- 

 sident of the Piseco Club, " with red flesh, weighing twenty-four 

 pounds," or it is a very large specimen of the Brook Trout, and, 

 moreover, wonderfully exaggerated in dimensions. 



It is a remarkable peculiarity of the American Trout, that it is 



