47 
the Sunapee spawning beds; but these differences are 
sometimes carried to the verge of distortion or even mon- 
strosity. Humped backs are not infrequent; but the most 
repulsive and at the same time most common malformation 
is the shrinking of the mature fish into an eel-like shape, 
with abdominal respiration and an intensely reproachful 
human look in the cavernous eyes, which fix your gaze 
with a mysterious intelligence. The death scene of such 
a fish will haunt one for days, tempting him to speculation 
in the field of metempsychosis. 
Prof. Garman has proclaimed his belief in the identity 
of the Sunapee, Dan Hole and Flood’s Pond charrs with 
the European saibling, and that ‘‘the affinities of these 
forms are closer to that saibling by way of an Atlantic 
steamer than by way of Greenland and Iceland.’ 
Prof. Jordan has said ‘‘the American charr is probably 
not a distinct species, but native to the waters where it is 
now found, and not animportation from Europe.”’ ‘Should 
it appear,”’ he continues, ‘that the saibling in that part 
of Germany from which specimens have been brought to 
America, have gill-rakers like those of the Sunapee trout, 
this opinion would be reconsidered.’? Prof. Garman has 
disposed of the gill-raker argument, but as far as I know 
Prof. Jordan has not further expressed himself in regard 
to the Sunapee form; although in a recent article on the 
salmon and trout of the Pacific coast he states that ‘‘in the 
lakes of Greenland and the eastern part of British America 
the European charr is as abundant as it is in EKurope—a 
fact which has only lately been made manifest.”’ 
Mr. J. G. A. Creighton, of Ottawa, Canada, writes under 
date of February 16, 1893: ‘‘From the height and char- 
acter of Sunapee Lake, it is not at all improbable that an 
Arctic variety may have survived there which has perished, 
or been transformed, elsewhere south of 55° or 60° N. Lat. 
Arctic species must have been common to all our waters in 
the Glacial period.”’ 
