THE CARP FAMILY. 133 



Camden, in his ' Britannia/ also alludes to this circum- 

 stance. "I have seen," he says, "the bellies of Pikes 

 which have been rent open, have their gaping wounds 

 presently closed by the touch of the Tench, and by his 

 glutinous slime perfectly healed up." 



Equally numerous, if not perhaps more credible, are the 

 testimonies to the fact that the Pike, destructive and in- 

 satiable towards all else, has yet that "grace of courtesy" 

 left in him that he spares to molest his physician, even 

 when most pressed by hunger : amongst other angling au- 

 thorities, Oppian, "Walton, Camden, Hollinshed, Bowlker, 

 Salter, Williamson, Hofland, and Fitzgibbon, all acknow- 

 ledge to more or less faith in the truth of the assertion. 

 Salter says, " I have known several trimmers to be laid at 

 night, baited with live fish, roach, dace, bleak, and tench, 

 each about 6 or 7 inches long ; and when those trimmers 

 were examined in the morning, both eels and jack have 

 been taken by hooks baited with any other fish than Tench, 

 which I found as lively as when put into the water the pre- 

 ceding night, without ever having been disturbed. This has 

 invariably been the case during my experience ; neither have 

 I met with one solitary instance to the contrary related 

 by any of my acquaintance, who have had numerous op- 

 portunities of noticing the singular circumstance of the 

 perfect freedom from death or wounds which the Tench 

 enjoys over every other inhabitant of the liquid element, 

 arising from continual conflicts with each other." 



To try the experiment, I recently procured some small 



