414 SALMON AND TROUT. 



late Mr. Garnelt. Messrs. Farlow have introduced a very neat 

 variation of the ordinary soHd brass Devon (fig. 2), gold, silver, 

 or painted, rigged to obviate the hook-complications incident 

 to the latter well-known flight. These minnows do not slip 

 up the line when a fish is run. Nor does Hardy's ' Excelsior ' 

 spinner (fig. 3), v/hich closely resembles the quill minnow in 

 external form and ' rig,' but is made of solid, or nearly solid, 

 metal. The ' Watchet bait,' in gold and silver, as mounted 

 by Messrs. Farlow (fig. 4), is constructed on the ' slip-up ' 

 principle. 



FIG. 4. — 'WATCHET BAIT.' 



My old friend, the late Mr. Thomas Wcstwood, bibliophile, 

 poet, and fisherman, in one of the last letters I had from 

 him, writes : ' I tried the other day, with great success, a 

 minnow called the '• Derby Trout Killer." It is sold by John 

 Bullock, Compton Street, Derby. Ask for sizes No. i and 

 No. 2. I bagged seventeen trout with it in a very short time, 

 and a friend, who fished with me, twenty.' 



The minnow, both natural and artificial, can be used at all 

 times of the season, and in all rivers where its employment is 

 not interdicted. ' It is especially successful in- some of the 

 Devonshire and Cornwall streams for taking what is locally 

 known as ' salmon peel ' — a variety of migratory Salmonidce 

 to which ichthyologists have not yet agreed in assigning a 

 specific place. Some writers consider it as a sort of small-sized 

 grilse, or the young of the true salmon on its first return from 

 the sea, and others merely as a variety of the salmon trout. 

 Unfortunately many of the streams of Devonshire and Cornwall 

 have been so frightfully polluted of late years by mine water 



