Fishes. 4125 



by any other fish," &c, and that " all other kinds of fish, rats, young ducks, &c, have 

 fallen a sacrifice to the all-devouring pike, but not the tench!'' I heartily wish the lat- 

 ter part of this statement were true, and borne out by fact. Now I will relate what 

 lately occurred to myself. In the autumn of 1848 I turned into a pit, which I be- 

 lieved to contain no fish of any kind, fifty small tench and forty or more crucian carp; 

 seven tench and twenty-four crucians were also turned in at a subsequent period. One 

 sunny day last August I was much surprised at seeing three or four very small pike 

 basking in the shallow near the side of the pit ; they were not so long as my finger, 

 and must have been bred the foregoing spring. This convinced me that, no doubt, 

 there were some larger pike in the water, the parents of these small fry ; and I began 

 to think it would fare but badly with my store tench and crucians. So I resolved to 

 drag the pit, and accordingly did so on the 13th of October. We caught three pike, 

 weighing respectively, I should guess, 3 lbs., 2fbs., and l£flb., or thereabouts. They 

 were not in good condition, and, from their length and frame, ought to have been con- 

 siderably heavier. But what had become of the tench and the crucians ? All that 

 remained out of the fifty-seven tench and the sixty-four or more crucians, were one 

 tench of 1^ lt>. weight, and eight crucians of about 1 tb. each. I cannot have the 

 smallest doubt that the pike had devoured the fish that were missing ; and that these 

 nine that remained only escaped because they were rather too large for pike of the size 

 above-mentioned to swallow conveniently. I am quite aware that a pike of 3 fbs. will 

 make no great difficulty of devouring an ordinary fish of a pound weight or more ; but 

 the crucian carp is so deep a fish, being nearly as broad as it is long, that one of less 

 even than a pound would be a very awkward morsel for any but a large pike to swal- 

 low. The above is not a solitary instance of its kind ; similar ones, and those even 

 still more decisive of the point in question, have come under my notice several times. 

 As to the opinions of keepers, I cannot always place implicit confidence in them. I 

 remember once trolling for pike in a large pool or lake, which, among other fish, 

 abounded in bream. The keeper, an intelligent man, insisted on it that pike never 

 preyed upon bream. I was very sceptical ; or, rather, I totally disbelieved the state- 

 ment : so, to test the matter, I set to work and trolled with a small bream as a bait, 

 and presently convinced him of his error by catching a pike with it. The fact is, when 

 the pike is in the humour for his prey, nothing that he sees in motion comes amiss to 

 him, be it fish, flesh or fowl, or even far less digestible articles, as, for example, ordi- 

 nary pebble-stones of considerable size, which, in several instances, I have known ta- 

 ken out of a pike's stomach, (see Loudon's Mag. Nat. Hist. iii. 241). It may seem a 

 strange thing to say, nevertheless it is a veritable fact, that pike, and, I may add, trout 

 and perch too, will absolutely eat a larger fish than it is possible for them to swallow, 

 — to swallow, that is, all at once ; so that while the head of the prey is digesting in 

 the stomach, the tail end remains projecting out of the mouth of the devourer ; and it 

 will sometimes happen that in this way the pike is choked, and falls a sacrifice to his 

 own voracity. I was a good deal amused at the title I once heard given to the pike 

 by a miller residing on the Wiltshire Avon, a beautifully clear stream, in some parts 

 of which the pike have nearly exterminated the trout : — " We call it, Sir," he said 

 (apologizing for the freedom of his speech), " we call it the water-devil." I have heard 

 of a certain gentleman, a kind of male Mrs. Malaprop (so to say), who, in speaking of 

 the voracity of the pike, is reported to have said that it was "by far the most avaricious 

 of all quadrupeds ! " Depend upon it — and let all the lovers of the delicious physi- 

 cian of fish bear it in mind — that the notion that the pike will not feed upon tench, is 



