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more or less over the waters of Great Britain, but it is 

 with the carp-bream I shall have here to do. The white 

 bream is a fish hardly worth pens, ink, and paper. It 

 seldom exceeds a pound in weight, and though its colouring 

 is pretty enough, being very silvery, it is covered with an 

 indescribably nasty slime, something like starch, and 

 almost as difficult to get off the fingers as bird-lime. When 

 I used to fish in Dagenham Gulf, which swarmed — as 

 indeed it does now — with these fish, and as a boy had no 

 natural horror of anything nasty, I well remember my 

 dislike to these fish, and was always disappointed when 

 one turned up instead of a roach or perch. I therefore 

 dismiss Abramis blicca, and those who take the trouble to 

 read this Note will kindly remember that when I use the 

 word bream I mean the carp-bream. 



There is not much ichthyological interest attaching to 

 the bream. He is not a handsome fish by any means, 

 and though he is called " golden/' his gold is of a very 

 dull character, and he is not free from that objectionable 

 slime that distinguishes his cousin the white bream. By 

 the way, was the carp-bream originally a cross between 

 the common carp and the white bream ? I should think 

 so, as he seems to get his " golden " colour from the for- 

 mer and his slimy coating from the latter. He grows 

 quickly in suitable water, and when he attains the weight 

 of 3 lbs. or 4 lbs. he is by no means unlike a pair 

 of bellows in shape, being almost as deep as he is long, 

 and hence he is called in some districts the "bellows" 

 fish. In some parts of Europe bream have been known 

 to attain the weight of 20 lbs., and it is recorded that, in 

 1749, 5000 were taken out of a lake in Sweden at one 

 haul, the aggregate weight of which was 18,000 lbs. In 



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