178 FISHING GOSSIP. 
greater advantage than the native ones. There are, 
however, two genera, to which this similarity of the 
fish fauna of Great Britain with that of the Continent 
and America does not extend—viz. river charrs and 
silures. There is a magnificent kind of the former 
genus in the Danube, a fish well known to all the 
readers of the Field, under the name of huchen.* If 
“the efforts to restore the Thames to the number of 
salmon rivers should fail, it would be an attempt 
worthy of the Acclimatisation Society to introduce 
the huchen into it, as it does not go down to the sea, 
and would of itself fairly compensate for the gudgeons 
and roach which form its principal food. Moreover, 
its introduction by means of artificial hatching would 
be the best way of convincing those who with Von 
Baer t contend that artificial impregnation produces 
sickly fry with the blood-vessels incompletely de- 
veloped. 
The silures are represented in America by several 
species, but none of them attain to the size of the wels, 
nor are they esteemed in their own country as an 
* The question has been discussed whether there exist charrs 
passing all their life in rivers ; the huchen is an instance of such a 
fish, as it is proved by its zoological characters to belong to that 
group ; other examples could be mentioned from Canada and the 
rivers west of the Rocky Mountains. 
+ The great natural philosopher of St. Petersburg, who may be 
called the inventor of artificial inpregnation of fish-eggs, and whose 
observations on this subject are invaluable, 
