276 DELIBERATE INTRODUCTION OF NEW ANIMALS 



SOME SPORTING FISHES 



Reference has already been made to freshwater fishes 

 introduced for the value of their flesh as food, but another con- 

 sideration that of sport has been a contributory factor in 

 bringing to our rivers a number of denizens of foreign lands. 

 The most' venerable of such sporting fishes, from the 

 point of view of its establishment and supposed associa- 

 tions, is undoubtedly the Grayling ( Thymallus thymallus], 

 so long a recognized inhabitant of our rivers that the date 

 of its coming is forgotten. Its introduction, like that of 

 several other fishes, has, for lack of a better suggestion, 

 been attributed to the monks; but it has been pointed out 

 that while many of its local fisheries are in neighbourhoods 

 where monasteries once stood, yet in English counties where 

 there were many monasteries there are no Grayling, and 

 further, that so sensitive a fish could scarcely have been con- 

 veyed alive from the Continent with the means at the dis- 

 posal of the monks. However that may be, the Grayling, a 

 .native of the continental countries from Italy and Hungary to 

 Lapland, is now firmly established as an angling fish in many 

 British rivers. In Scotland, it is common in the upper 

 reaches of the Clyde where 10,000 eggs from the Derwent 

 were planted in 1857, as well as in the Rivers Ayr, Lugar 

 and Greenburn in Ayrshire, and in the Gryffe Water in 

 Renfrewshire. In Dumfriesshire it was introduced into the 

 Nith in 1857 or 1858, and a few years later into the 

 Annan. Fewer than a dozen were set free in the Tay some 

 twenty years ago, and already in 1905 they were so well 

 established that "it was not astonishing to catch one any- 

 where between Perth and Kenmore." It occurs also in the 

 Tweed and its tributaries, amongst them the Teviot, where 

 the first example was caught in 1855, having escaped from 

 a pond at Monteviot where it had been introduced by the 

 Marquis of Lothian about that time. So abundant is it now 

 in Tweed that netting for coarse fish at the instance of 

 the Tweed Commissioners resulted in the capture of 5791 

 Grayling in 1913, and 71 78 in 1914. Low (1813) stated that 

 it was common in Orkney. 



If the Grayling first made itself at home in our rivers, 



