NATURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SALMONIDZ. 163 
Thames is, of course, one of the best known, and here fish up 
to ten pounds or twelve pounds weight are by no means rare. 
Indeed, I have before me an authentic record of a trout, taken 
in the Thames, which weighed twenty-three pounds and a half, 
and which is now, or was some years ago, preserved at the 
cottage of George Keen, fisherman, of Weybridge. This fish 
was taken at Shepperton Weir, if I remember rightly, with a 
spinning bait. At any rate the specimen is, no doubt, still 
extant to bear testimony in favour of its own authenticity. 
I have referred to another at Laleham, which weighed twenty- 
one pounds, and one of sixteen pounds and a half was taken 
by Mr. John Harris, landlord of the ‘ Lincoln Arms,’ Weybridge, 
at Laleham, in 1822. 
Many other English waters besides the Thames produce 
very large trout. I have caught some heavyish specimens 
myself in the Hampshire Avon, above Ringwood, and at Herd- 
cott House, near Salisbury, there is preserved the skin of a 
trout taken from a tributary running through that town, which 
weighed twenty-five pounds, and measured four feet two inches 
and a half in length, its girth being two feet one inch. 
This leviathan is probably the fish alluded to in the ‘ Trans- 
actions of the Linnean Society’ as being caught on the 11th 
of January, 1822, in a brook some ten feet wide at the back of 
Castle Street, Salisbury. 
‘A trout which weighed twenty-seven pounds was landed a few 
days ago by an angler 1 in Lord Normanton’s Somerley water in the 
Hants Avon. This exceptionally fine fish was despatched as a 
present to the Speaker.’ — World, July 10, 1889. 
Lord Craven had some years ago a fresh-water trout of 
seventeen pounds from his stews in Berkshire. The trout had 
been known in the stew for eight years. In the neighbourhood 
of Downton on the Avon, a trout was caught with the fly by a 
Mr. Bailey which weighed fourteen pounds ; and in a small 
tributary of the Trent, at Drayton Manor, one was taken ex- 
ceeding in weight twenty-one pounds. A portrait of this fish 
is still in the possession of the family of the late Sir Robert 
Peel. A male fresh-water non-migratory trout of thirty pounds 
