50 Bigelow's Observations on Salmo Fontinalis. 
Their beds, as they are called, are merely small cavities 
formed by the accidental position of three or four stones, 
sunk to their upper surfaces in sand. Their capacity is gen- 
erally from a pint to a quart, and their forms are various ; 
sometimes conical, with the base upward, sometimes flat and 
shallow. They are most numerous within ten feet of the 
shore, and in not more than ten or twelve inches of water. 
The trout having selected these little cavities, clean them out 
with great care, removing the finer particles of dirt by fanning 
with their tails, and the larger with their mouths; this done, 
they have a bed which they visit for a successive series of 
years, which will be longer or shorter, as they are more or less 
disturbed. An old fisherman pointed out to me abandoned 
beds, on which he had in former years taken great numbers. 
They were on the south side of the pond, whence the fish had 
gradually followed the shore, till year before last, when they . 
came up on the extreme south-west shore, where I found 
them. They remain in the deep water about the centre, of 
the pond, during the entire year except the spawning»season, 
which commences about the first of October. So precise are 
they in their time of appearing, that this fisherman has for’ 
the last six or eight successive years taken fifty or seventy-five 
pounds, on the first day of October, when even the day before 
he could neither see a trout nor geta bite. They failed, how- 
ever to be thus regular last season. The first four days 
of October were quite warm and rainy, and with almost con- 
stant fishing we caught only ten or fifteen pounds during that 
time, and those in water of twenty or twenty-five feet in 
depth. This proximity to the shore, however, showed them 
to be approaching their beds, and a few cold nights brought 
them up. "The unusual mildness of the season, causing too 
great a difference in the temperature between the deep water 
they inhabit and the shallows on the border, may be the cause 
of their late appearance. But it was no easy matter to make 
a convert of the old fisherman to this doctrine ; he held firmly 
to his old notion, that “ they had a wonderful sight of alman- 
ae 
