Other Trouts and the SahndnS. i6i 



Patterson, M. B., M. R. C. S., F. Z. S., and the notes 

 by the Editor. As Sir Lucius O'Trigger says : 'It's a 

 very pretty fight as it stands.' 



"Mr. Patterson is correct in the main, but assumes 

 that the 'steel-head salmon' (S. gairdneri) is a salmon, a 

 natural mistake to make from its popular name. It is 

 a big river trout, so very like the rainbow in structure 

 and markings that at one time some ichthyologists 

 thought them the same fish. 



"Since our favorite fontinalis has refused to stay in 

 English streams, the fact that irideiis may not have 

 established itself in waters of the State of New York 

 is no proof that it may not be good in yours. Most 

 Americans think that fontinalis, the char which we call 

 'brook trout,' is the best trout in the world. It is, in its 

 home. On Long Island and in Canada, where it can, 

 it goes to salt water, and comes back plump and in ex- 

 cellent order, but its red spots gone if it stays there long. 

 Then in Canada it is called 'sea trout.' In the trout 

 streams of the Hudson river it is barred from the sea 

 by the warm water of the river in summer, and in win- 

 ter it does not want to go down. 



"When I was engaged in fishculture all our fishcul- 

 turists disliked the rainbow trout at first because its 

 eggs did not impregnate well, and we had to pick out 

 about 75 per cent, of unfertile eggs. This is not so 

 now. Then the fish had been taken from waters which 

 were colder in the spring, when the snows above the 

 short streams west of the Rockies melted, and it was a 

 spring spawner, for all Salmonidce spawn on a falling 

 temperature. Gradually the rainbow changed its habit, 

 and began to spav/n earlier, until now, after some 

 twenty or more generations of breeding in the east, it 

 spawns in the fall or early winter. If you get more 



