ORN.—Behold! the loss was more owing to the imperfection of the tackle than to my ardour; for the two end hooks only are gone, and you may see the gut worn. HAL.—The thing is done, and is not worth comment. If you can, let the next fish that rises hook himself. When we are ardent, we are bad judges of the effort we make; and an angler, who could be cool with a new species of salmo, I should not envy. Now all is right again: try that pool. There is a fish—ay! and another, that runs at your bait; but they are small ones, not much more than twice as large as the bleak; yet they show their spirit, and though they cannot swallow it, they have torn it. Put on another bleak. There! you have another run. ORN.—Ay, it is a small fish, not much more than a foot long; yet he fights well. HAL.—You have him, and I will land him. I do not think such a fish a bad initiation into this kind of sport. He does not agitate so much as a larger one, and yet gratifies curiosity. There, we have him. A very beautiful fish; yet he has the leech, or louse, though his belly is quite white. ORN.—This fish is so like a trout, that, had I caught him when alone, I should hardly have remarked his peculiarities; and I am not convinced, that it is not a variety of the common trout, altered, in many generations, by the predatory habits of his ancestors. HAL.—How far the principle of change of character and transmission of such character to the offspring will apply, I shall not attempt to determine, and whether all the varieties of the salmo with teeth in their mouth may not have been produced from one original; yet this fish is _now_ as distinct from the trout, as the _char_ or the _umbla_ is; and in Europe, it exists only below great falls in streams connected with the Danube, and is never found in rivers of the same districts connected with the Rhine, Elbe, or which empty themselves into the Mediterranean; though trout are common in all these streams, and salmon and sea trout in those connected with the ocean. According to the descriptions of Pallas, it occurs in the rivers of Siberia, and probably exists in those that run into the Caspian; and it is remarkable, that it is not found where the eel is usual—at least this applies to all the tributary streams of the Danube, and, it is said, to the rivers of Siberia. Wherever I have seen it, there have been always coarse fish—as chub, white fish, bleak, &c., and rivers containing such fish are its natural haunts, for it requires abundance of food, and serves to convert these indifferent poor fish into a better kind of nourishment for man. We will now examine the interior of these fish. You see the stomach is larger than that of a trout, and the stomachs of both are full of small fish. In the larger one there is a chub, a grayling, a bleak, and two or three small carp. The skin you see is thick; the scales are smaller than those of a trout; it has no teeth on the palate, and the pectoral fin