THE PIKE FAMILY. 129 



down to attract the notice of the Grar, which soon appears, 

 and as it seizes the fish crosswise (which is its custom) it 

 runs its long upper jaw or rather its bill into the noose, when 

 the string is tightened by lifting the pole, and the Gar drawn 

 ashore. I have heard it said that the Alligator Gar has been 

 taken as long as eight feet. 



Dr. Bethune in his notes to his edition of "Walton, says : 

 " The name Esox is first used by Pliny, who describes a great 

 fish in the Rhine, which attained the size of a thousand 

 pounds (! ! !), was caught with a hook attached to a chaii\ 

 {catenato hamo), and drawn out by oxen {bourn jugis)." Of its 

 introduction into England he remarks : " The Pike is said to 

 have been brought into England about the time of the 

 Reformation, according to a distich erroneously quoted by 

 Walton, when speaking of the Carp, from Baker's Chronicles 

 (p. 317, ed. 1665), where it is, 



' Turkeys, Carps, Hoppes, Piccarel, and Beer, 

 Came into England all in one year ;' 



i. e., the fifteenth year of Henry VIII. This is, however, all 

 error. Pike or Pickerel were the subject of legal regulations 

 in the time of Edward I. Turkeys were brought from 

 America about 1521. Hops were introduced about 1524." 



The Doctor says that Pliny, in his description of the thou- 

 sand pounder, wrote only from hearsay. In alluding to 

 Gesner's Pike, he quotes Bloch, the ichthyologist, who says : 

 " This Pike was fifteen feet long, and weighed three hundred 

 and fifty pounds. His skeleton was for a long time preserved 

 at Manheim." 



Pickering, in his Piscatorial Reminiscences, speaks of a 

 Pike killed (caught) in Loch Spey that weighed one hundred 

 and forty-six pounds. Of another of twenty-eight pounds, in 

 9 



