222 A BOOK ON ANGLING 



step out in the grey of the morning, with everything in readi- 

 ness for a slaughtering day, find your hatred and detestation, 

 that anathematised Tomkins fishing it, and having no end 

 of sport, such, indeed, as you have never had, and hardly hope 

 to have ever again ; and now go and catch your grayling in 

 May and June, and much good may they do you. I hope 

 you'll eat 'em all of 'em that's allj and that your wife 

 will have locked up the brandy, and gone out for a day or two ; 

 and please send for Dr. Francis to administer consolation. 

 Ha ! ha ! ho ! I hate a man who slaughters kelts and ill- 

 conditioned fish more than any other species of poacher going. 

 What good does it do him ? He has had his sport. Let him be 

 satisfied ; and let the poor beast live to grow fat and healthy, 

 and don't take a mean advantage of starvation and 

 illness. 



Grayling are supposed not to have been indigenous to 

 England, but to have been transplanted hither by the monks ; 

 but we have no direct proof of this, and the collateral evidence 

 is worth nothing.* First, it is assumed that they were so 

 introduced by the monks because on or near every river 

 containing grayling there are the remains of monastic institu- 

 tions. I am not quite sure that this is invariably so, but if it 

 were, one might easily ask whether in the first place the monks 

 came to the grayling with that perspicacity they are so remark- 

 able for, or whether the grayling came to them. Again, it 

 might be asked, how many rivers of any note are there in the 

 country on or near which, in some sort, institutions of 

 monastic origin have always been absent ? I am not at all 

 convinced, clever though the monks were in fish matters, that 

 they introduced grayling, and I am rather inclined to think 

 that if they had introduced them, the introduction would 

 scarcely be so partial as it is. Grayling abound in many of the 

 Scandinavian rivers and lakes, and are found in very many of 



* Grayling are undoubtedly indigenous in the rivers of the English east 

 coast from the Yare of Norfolk to the Humber, including the Trent and all 

 its tributaries. Its presence there dates from a remote period when these 

 rivers were tributaries of the Rhine as it flowed through the great plain now 

 covered by the North Sea. That the grayling is not indigenous to the Thames 

 (where it has been introduced in recent years) seems either to imply that 

 some obstruction prevented its access to that river from the Rhine, or to 

 confirm the theory of Sir Andrew Ramsay (1814-1891), sometime President 

 of the Geological Society, that the Thames originally flowed from east to 

 west into the Severn Valley, and that its course was reversed in consequence 

 of the depression which formed the North Sea and an eastward tilt of the 

 chalk and eocene beds through which the Thames flows. ED. 



