314 SALMON AND TROUT. 
stream. One! especially looks as if it would be ‘catawampously 
chawed up’ by any trout of good taste. The shell is very frail, 
with a wide transparent lip ; and in warm weather you may see 
them by hundreds floating over the surface of a weedy pool 
with this lip upwards, surmounted and overlapped by a tempt- 
ing expanse of soft, fat body, most inviting to any hungry fish. 
They are, it is true, chiefly found in still pools, but would 
thrive in the slow sedgy reaches and quiet backwaters of large 
streams. 
This is not a mere conjecture of my own. A valued friend, 
the late Mr. Morton Allport, of Hobart Town, to whose judg- 
ment and energy Tasmanian pisciculture owed much of its 
success, imported a number of these shell fish soon after the 
introduction of English Sa/monide into the island, and watched 
their multiplication with great interest. He found that they 
would thrive in quiet streams, and showed them to me cluster- 
ing round a bed of the English water lily. They were, in his 
opinion, excellent food for both trout and perch. 
I have yet one more form of trout diet to mention which 
May surprise many of my readers. I speak of a certain very 
small leech, never, I believe, found in rivers, but abundant in 
sundry lochs. I must confess myself utterly ignorant of the 
laws which determine the habitat of these delicate crawlers, but 
I have found trout literally gorged with them who were far 
above the common standard in colour and flavour ; and were 
I about to establish a normal training school for Salmonide, I 
would stock my lake or reservoir with a few hundred of these 
hirudines, obtained, e.g. from Llyn Manwd, near Festiniog. 
I have gone into these details from a conviction that the 
trout fishing of the future must turn in great measure on the 
question of food, and that any and every means should be tried 
to increase the supply. In dry seasons, the upper waters of 
our streams require especial looking to, when they are too much 
shrunk to attract the fly fisher. It is occasionally necessary to 
move large numbers of the fish down the stream as its sources 
1 Palustris ? 
