THE SALMON 33 



of an intruder, to shed their milt on the ova; hybrids 

 may thus be formed, but they would be extremely 

 difficult to recognize ; it may be, however, that 

 certain examples which occasionally occur, and 

 which it is not easy to refer with certainty to 

 either species, are really hybrids. It has been 

 ascertained experimentally that the hybrid off- 

 spring of Salmon and Trout are deficient in vitality, 

 often malformed, and seldom, in the case of the 

 males probably never, come to maturity ; however, 

 eggs obtained from ripe female hybrids were milted 

 from a Lochleven Trout, and a large proportion 

 of them hatched, and the young fish did well. 



The eggs hatch out at the end of the winter, and 

 the fry, or alevins, weighed down by the large yolk- 

 sac which contains their food for the first month or 

 two of their lives, continue to dwell in the spaces 

 between the stones of the spawning-bed, or " redd," 

 until the yolk-sac is absorbed, and they come out 

 and begin to shift for themselves ; they now form 

 shoals of little fish about an inch long, which live 

 on the shallows, and usually attain a length of 

 3 or 4 inches in a year and 5 or 6 inches in 

 two years, during which they feed and grow in fresh 

 water, and are known as parr ; their food consists of 

 shrimps, insects, etc., and they rise to the fly readily. 



The author has examined a number of parr from 

 3 to 4 inches long, taken at Romsey at the 

 end of February, and consequently about a year 

 old. In these the back is bluish or purplish, and 

 there is a series of seven to eleven large, vertically 

 elongate, oblong, or oval spots of the same hue, the 

 parr-marks, along the middle of the side ; behind 

 the eye appear three blackish spots in a straight 



