BROOK TROUT 



not to be taught by book, yet it teaches many things 

 itself which are not so easily learned in any other 

 school. And since many men of great wisdom, learn- 

 ing, and experience now practise this art, scientific 

 accuracy demands that I should modify the title of 

 this little treatise, at least to the extent of frankly 

 avowing, even at the risk of a solecism, that neither 

 big trout, nor little trout, nor trout of any kind what- 

 ever are to be found, either in Lake Edward, Lake 

 Nepigon, or Lake Batiscan ; or, for the matter of that, 

 in any of the meres, or lakes, or rivers, of which it is 

 my pleasant recreation to converse with the brethren 

 of the Angle. 



The ever-beautiful fish of these waters, whose sci- 

 entific name is Salvelinus fontinalis, has been called a 

 trout, it is true, ever since it became known to the 

 first European settlers of its environment. It came by 

 its vernacular name, says Professor Prince, through the 

 Pilgrim Fathers ; who, when they first saw it in New 

 England, mistook it for the same fish which they had 

 known in their own Devonshire streams, and which 

 it resembles in size, form, and other characteristics, 

 although materially differing from it in structure, and 

 especially in the essentially distinguishing trait of the 

 arrangement of teeth upon the vomer. The new- 

 comers were evidently delighted to think that the 

 rivers in the new land, like those of the old, were 

 trout streams, and they gave the fish found in them 

 the name that most nearly reminded them of a form 



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