HAL.—Nay, my friends! spare me a little, spare my gray hairs. I have not perhaps abused my youth so much as some of my friends, but all things that you have known, I have known; and if I have not been so much scorched by the passions from which so many of my acquaintances have suffered, I owe it rather to the constant employment of a laborious profession, and to the exertions called for by the hopes, wants, and wishes of a rising family, than to any merits of my own, either moral or constitutional. For my health, I may thank my ancestors, after my God, and I have not squandered what was so bountifully given; and though I do not expect, like our arch-patriarch, Walton, to number ninety years and upwards, yet, I hope, as long as I can enjoy in a vernal day the warmth and light of the sunbeams, still to haunt the streams—following the example of our late venerable friend, the President of the Royal academy,[9] in company with whom, when he was an octogenarian, I have thrown the fly, caught trout, and enjoyed a delightful day of angling and social amusement, in the shady green meadows by the bright clear streams of the Wandle. ADDITIONAL NOTES. (_On the par, page 75._) The author, in supposing that the par may be produced from a cross between the river trout and the sea trout, does not mean to attach any importance to this idea. The fish differs so little from the common trout, that it may be questioned, whether it is not more entitled to the character of a variety than of a species. In many rivers on the continent, the author has seen small trout with olive or brown marks, like those of the British par; and a friend informs him, that he has caught fish of the same kind in the streams connected with the Lake of Geneva. In rivers, flowing into the Danube, these small fish are very common; but, as well as he remembers, their marks are pale, or yellowish-brown, or olive, and not dark or blue like those of our par. The salmon does not belong to any of these localities, but the hucho haunts the tributary streams of the Danube. The smelts, or young of the salmo hucho, and sea trout, and lake trout, are all distinguished by the _uniform_ dark colour of the back, and the silvery whiteness of the belly. He does not remember to have seen any of the streaked, or par varieties of trout in rivers, in which there was only _one_ species, or variety of large salmo. The mottled colour of the skin is, he thinks, the strongest argument in favour of this little fish, being from a cross of two varieties, or races, which may be the case, and yet the fish be capable of breeding, and gaining this character of a peculiar variety; and he supposes different kinds of pars may be produced by crosses of the sea trout, the hucho, the lake trout, with the river trouts, or perhaps of the salmon, and this would account for their great numbers, and the various tints of the marks on their _sides_. If the hucho, as he