XX11 PREFATORY MEMOIR. 



quality than to the quantity of the sport, and laying little 

 stress upon enormous bags. In the deer-forest Mr Colquhoun 

 had in his younger days few equals among his contemporaries, 

 but the catholicity of his sporting tastes was against his taking 

 the foremost place in one particular line. With the rod he was 

 not less fatal than with the rifle, and it may almost be said 

 that it was his example and precepts that brought the Salmo 

 ferox within the sphere of practical angling. No other sports- 

 man of his generation had enjoyed the same opportunities of 

 gaining so extensive an experience of Scottish sport as had 

 John Colquhoun. There is scarcely a county where sport 

 existed in which he had not rented at one time or other 

 shootings or fishings. He had lived by the banks of the great 

 salmon rivers, the Tweed, the Tay, the Dee ; was at home on 

 the Perthshire and Eoss-shire lochs as much as on his own 

 Loch Lomond ; and had shot grouse and deer in every quarter 

 of North Britain. 



The powers of keen observation and capacity for reflec- 

 tion which Mr Colquhoun carried with him to the moor 

 and river-side naturally led him to record his sporting ex- 

 perience. It is now forty-eight years since ' The Moor and 

 the Loch' was first published, and though in the interval 

 the book has been entirely remodelled, and in a great mea- 

 sure rewritten, it was accepted at once as a high authority. 

 Another popular work of Mr Colquhoun's was ' Salmon Casts 

 and Stray Shots/ which, together with its successor, ' Sport- 

 ing Days/ was incorporated in the later editions of ' The 

 Moor and the Loch.' Several lectures on his favourite sub- 

 jects, which had been delivered to Edinburgh audiences, were 

 also published by him, and expanded in the more recent 

 editions of his principal work. In his later years, after 

 outdoor sport became an impossibility, much of his time 

 was devoted to the perfecting of ' The Moor and the Loch/ 

 which he wisely thought would remain the worthiest mem- 

 orial of his life and work. 



