This “distinct-species” dogma might have been still prevalent, had not the question been taken in hand and solved by practical men. Before mentioning the experiments of Shaw and Young, it will be curious to note the varieties of opinion which were evoked during the parr controversy, which has existed in one shape or another for something like two hundred years. As a proof of the difficulty of arriving at a correct conclusion amidst the conflict of evidence, I may cite the opinion of Yarrell, who held the parr to be a distinct fish. “That the parr,” he says, “is not the young of the salmon, or, indeed, of any other of the large species of Salmonidæ, as still considered by some, is sufficiently obvious from the circumstance that parr by hundreds may be taken in the rivers all the summer, long after the fry of the year of the larger migratory species have gone down to the sea.” Mr. Yarrell also says, “The smolt or young salmon is by the fishermen of some rivers called ‘a laspring;’” and explains, “The laspring of some rivers is the young of the true salmon; but in others, as I know from having had specimens sent me, the laspring is really _only a parr_.” Mr. Yarrell further states the prevalence of an opinion “that parrs were hybrids, and all of them males.” Many gentlemen who would not admit that parr were salmon in their first stage have lived to change their opinion. My friend Mr. Robert Buist, the intelligent and very obliging conservator of the Stormontfield breeding-ponds, is one of the gentlemen who now finds, from the results of most accurate experiments conducted under his own personal superintendence, that he was in error in holding the parr to be a distinct fish. A very eminent living naturalist, who has now seen all the stages of the question, said at one time that the parr had no connection whatever with the migratory salmon; and also that “males are found so far advanced as to have the milt flow on being handled; but at the same time, and indeed all the females which I have examined, had the roe in a backward state, and they have not been discovered spawning in any of the shallow streams or lesser rivulets, like the trout.” Such extracts could be multiplied to almost any extent, but I can only give one more, and it is from the same writer. After minutely describing the anatomy of the fish, he thus sums up: “In this state, therefore, I have no hesitation in considering the parr not only distinct, but one of the best and most constantly marked species we have.”