58 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. PART I. 



taken in the Lake of Geneva are a great part of the mer- 

 chandize of that famous city. And you are further to 

 know, that there be certain waters that breed Trouts 

 remarkable both for their number and smallness. I 

 know a little brook in Kent, that breeds them to a num- 

 ber incredible, and you may take them twenty or forty 

 in an hour, but none greater than about the size of a 

 Gudgeon. There are also, in divers rivers, especially 

 that relate to, or be near to the sea, (as Winchester, 

 or the Thames about Windsor,) a little Trout called a 

 Samlet, or Skegger Trout, (in both which places I have 

 caught twenty or forty at a standing,) that will bite as 

 fast and as freely as Minnows : these be by some taken 

 to be young Salmon ; but in those waters they never grow 

 to be bigger than a Herring. 



There is also in Kent, near to Canterbury, a Trout 

 called there a Fordidge Trout, a Trout that bears the 

 name of the town where it is usually caught, that is 

 accounted the rarest of fish; many of them near the 

 bigness of a Salmon, but known by their different colour; 

 and in their best season they cut very white : and none 

 of these have been known to be caught with an angle, 

 unless it were one that was caught by Sir George Hast- 

 ings, an excellent angler, and now with God : and he 

 hath told me, he thought THAT Trout bit not for hunger 

 but wantonness ; and it is the rather to be believed, be- 

 cause both he, then, and many others before him, have 

 been curious to search into their bellies, what the food 

 was by which they lived ; and have found out nothing by 

 which they might satisfy their curiosity. 



Concerning which you are to take notice, that it is 

 reported by good Authors, that grasshoppers ' and some 



(1) It IMS been said by naturalists, particularly by Sir Theodore Mayerne, in an 

 Epistle to Sir William Paddy, prefixed to the translation of Mouffet's Insect. 

 Theatr. printed with Topel's History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, that 



