Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/546

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
470
THE ZOOLOGIST.

NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.


Salmon and Trout. By Dean Sage, C.H. Townsend, H.M. Smith, and W.C. Harris. New York: The Macmillan Company.

This book forms one of the series known as "The American Sportsman's Library"; it transports us to the rivers and lakes of North America, and in the recital of its interesting theme we forget that we are anglers, and as naturalists absorb its interesting bionomical facts and observations. The Salmon has long possessed almost a literature of its own, and it is worthy of it; Mr. Dean Sage occupies the first section of the volume with his story of the Atlantic Salmon. We all know the perversity with which fish will respond to the allurement of the fly, and every angler has engraven on his memory the reminiscence of those hours when they would rise at anything. Even injuries will not prevent this experimental voracity. Mr. Sage has known instances of fish taking the fly when so badly hurt as to make it seem almost incredible that they should want to move. "I took one which had lately lost a good pound of flesh by a Seal bite, and saw one of twenty-three pounds taken, which I afterwards learned had been hooked, played, gaffed, and lost the evening before about half a mile below. In addition to the fly embedded in his jaw with a yard of gut fast thereto, he had a deep open gaff wound in his shoulder." "The Pacific Salmons" are described by Messrs. Townsend and Smith, and the fine species of Oncorhynchus and Salmo gairdneri (the last in reality a Trout) receive concise but ample treatment.

To Mr. W.C. Harris is given the subject of the "Trouts of America." These fish appear to have given no less sport to the angler than satisfaction to the systematist in the elaboration of species and subspecies, a question with which we are now happily quite unconcerned. The living adaptations to their environment by these fishes are remarkable. In the Yellowstone Lake, Trout