166 SALMON AND TROUT. 
weight, from Lough Neagh, Ireland, was cooked at. Brooks’s 
Club, in October 1832. It was beautifully spotted, and its 
flesh of good colour and flavour. The length of this fish was 
forty inches, and its girth twenty-four inches. 
But here the difficulty above alluded to in distinguishing 
between the specimens of the Salmo fario and the Salmo ferox 
occurs, and in the absence of scientific verification leaves it in 
doubt to which of the two species this monster trout may have 
really belonged. 
This confusion appears to extend’ sometimes even to the 
salmon, for, when I was last at Staines, there was at the Swan 
Inn, a picture of a huge Thames trout which was taken at 
Shepperton, by Mr. George Marshall, of Brewer Street, London, 
on the 3rd of October, 1812, with a single-gut line and no 
landing net ; weight twenty-one pounds. The following was 
the subscription: ‘A Thames Salmon!’ The picture, which 
was not badly done, represents all the usual characteristics of 
a large Thames trout, except the tail, which was drawn square 
at the end ; from the age of the fish I should naturally have 
expected it to have been round. . .. Possibly this Thames 
trout had not eaten enough whitebait to develop aldermanic 
proportions. 
The trout is very rapidly affected by the nature of its food, 
as is well known to those who have compared the flesh of trout 
after and before the ‘ May-fly season.’ Some interesting ex- 
periments, by Mr. Stoddart, made in order to ascertain the 
relative fish nourishment to be extracted from different descrip- 
tions of food, have been put on record. The trout to be 
experimented upon were put in three separate tanks, and in 
one the fish were fed daily upon worms, in another upon live 
minnows, and in the third upon flies of various kinds. The 
result was, that the fish fed on the worms grew slowly, and had 
a lean appearance—those dieted upon minnows became much 
larger, whilst such as were fattened wholly upon flies attained in 
a short space of time extraordinary dimensions, weighing ‘zozce 
as much as both the others put together—the bulk of food eaten 
