THE TALE OF THE FISHES 



In the summer of 1882, while casting for black bass 

 at Lake Sunapee, N. H., I was asked by a gentleman 

 fishing from a boat nearby to weigh a large trout that 

 he had just caught. The trout had been taken in 

 comparatively deep water, was silvery in coloration, 

 and had a practically square tail. It weighed just 4 

 pounds. "What is it?" the captor asked. After a 

 moment's thought, I said, "Why, it is a brook trout" — 

 for it was evidently neither a blue-back (Salvelinus 

 oquassa) nor a laker with mackerel tail (Salvelinus 

 nama]^cush), and Agassiz had said there were only 

 three trouts in New England. So by exclusion it must 

 be fontinalis I did not know for three years that I 

 had discovered on that July day a new species of 

 Salvelinus not known at that time to exist on the Amer- 

 ican continent. But such proved to be the fact. In 

 October, 1885, a boy of the neighborhood accidentally 

 came upon a midlake spawning-bed, an acre or two 

 in area, covered with hundreds of the new fish ranging 



23 



