128 THE PAEE CONTEOTEEST. 



peel, the samlet, etc. The parr was at one time so wonderfully 

 plentiful, that farmers and cottars who resided near a salmon 

 river used not unfrequently, after filling the family frying-pan, 

 to feed their pigs with the dainty little fish ! Countless thou- 

 sands were annually killed by juvenUe anglers, and even so 

 lately as thirty years ago it never occurred either to country 

 gentlemen or their cottars that these parr were young salmon. 

 Indeed, the young of the salmon, as then recognised, was only 

 known as a smolt or smout. Parr were thought, as I have 

 already said, to be distinct fish of the minor or dwarf kind. 

 Some large-headed anglers, however, had their doubts about the 

 little parr, and naturalists found it difScult to procure specimens 



tARR ONE YEAR OLD. 



Half the natural size. 



of the fish with ova or milt in them. Dr. Knox, the anatomist, 

 asserted that the parr was a hybrid belonging to no particular 

 species of fish, but a mixture of many ; and it is curious enough 

 that although this fish was declared over and over again to be 

 a separate species, no one ever found a female parr containing 

 roe. The universal exclamation of naturalists for many a long 

 year was always : It is a quite distinct species, and not the young 

 of any larger fish. The above drawing represents a parr, the 

 engraving being exactly half the size of life. 



This "distinct-species" dogma might have been still pre- 

 valent, had not the question been taken in hand and solved by 

 practical men. Before mentioning the experiments of Shaw and 

 Young, it wUl be curious to note the varieties of opinion which 

 were evoked during the parr controversy, which has existed in 

 one shape or another for something like two hundred years. As 

 a proof of the difficulty of arriving at a correct conclusion amidst 

 the conflict of evidence, I may cite the opinion of Yarrell, who 

 held the parr to be a distinct fish. " That the parr," he says, 

 " is not the young of the salmon, or, indeed, of any other of the 



