196 
SALMON. 
take of three days only, and these were sold for one hundred 
and forty pounds. Mr. Mayhew (“London Labour,” etc.) says, 
hat the quantity of Salmon and Salmon Trout sold at 
Billingsgate in one year was twenty-nine thousand boxes, 
with fourteen fish in each box, making four hundred and six 
thousand fish in all, of the weight of thi’ee millions four 
hundred and eighty thousand pounds. There is little doubt 
that many of these Trout were sold as Salmon, since so 
different a fish as the Coalfish has been so sold to an ignorant 
purchaser. 
The Salmon was not known to the Greeks in ancient times, 
and is scarcely recognised by Roman writers, by whom 
generally it appears to have been held in little value, even at 
a time when luxury reigned to the utmost among them. Pliny 
mentions it (B. 9, C. 32,) but only as being much esteemed 
by the people of Aquitania, in Gaul; and yet many of his 
countrymen must have been long acquainted with it in the 
rivers of Britain, where they had been peaceably settled from 
a distant date. Ausonius is the only other Roman writer 
who mentions the Salmon, which he does in his characteristic 
poem on the River Moselle, and from whom we learn that 
the people there were aware of the distinctions which separate 
some species of the same family, and especially between the 
Salmo and one which he terms Salar, although modern 
writers have chosen to consider the names at least as applied 
to the same fish. The Ancient British name is given in a 
MS. in the Cotton Library as Ehoe, as also by Pryce in 
Cornwall, and by Pennant, on the authority of Richard 
Morris, Esq., Gleisiedyn, Eog and Maran; but although not 
British, the modern designation is not derived from a Greek 
or Roman root, and will rather be found in the name of 
the River Salmona, which passes into the Moselle, where this 
fish was found in abundance, and from whence perhaps the 
name was brought into our country by men who had been 
acquainted with the Salmon in both these regions. That the 
spee’'''s was the same appears from the lines of the poet, a 
portion of which has been already quoted: — 
Nee te puniceo mtilantem viscere Salmo. 
Pisli of the bright red flesh, the Salmon called. 
