“In February a few double winged water flies, which swim down the stream, are usually found in the middle of the day—such as the willow fly, and the cow-dung fly is sometimes carried on the water by winds. In March there are several flies found on most rivers, and in April, the blue and browns come on—the first in dark days—the second in bright. These lay their eggs in the water, which produce larvæ that remain in the state of worms, feeding and breathing in the water, till they are prepared for their metamorphosis, and quit the bottoms of the rivers, and the mud, and stone, for the surface, and the light and air.
“The brown fly usually disappears before the end of April—but of the blue dun there is a succession of different tints, or species, or varieties, which appear all the summer and autumn long. The excess of heat seems equally unfavorable, as the excess of cold, to the existence of the smaller species of water insect, which during the intensity of sunshine seldom appear in summer, but rise morning and evening. Towards the end of August the ephemera appear again in the middle of the day. To attempt to describe all the variety that sport on the surface of the water at different times of the day, throughout the year, would be quite an endless labour. Some of them appear to live only a few hours, none have their existence protracted to more than a few days. Of the beetle, there are many varieties fed on by fishes.—These insects are bred from eggs, which they deposit in the ground, or in the excrement of animals. The cock-chafer, the fern fly, and gray beetle, are common in our meadows in the summer, but there is hardly any insect that flies, including the wasp, the hornet, the bee, and the butter-fly, that does not become at sometime, the prey of fishes.”
Mr. Stoddart mentions an interesting experiment made with trout some years ago, in the South of England, in order to ascertain the value of different food. “Fish were placed in three separate tanks, one of which was supplied daily with worms, another with live minnows, and the third with those small dark coloured water flies, which are to be found moving about on the surface, under banks, and sheltered places. The trout fed with worms grew slowly, and had a lean appearance; those nourished on minnows, which it was observed they darted at with great avidity, became much larger; while, such as were fattened, upon flies only, attained in a small time, prodigious dimensions, weighing twice as much as both the others together, although the quantity of food swallowed by them was in nowise so great.”
In the new Sporting Magazine for Nov., 1840, a writer on fishes says, “An acutely-observing friend of mine, who has paid great attention to the growth of trout, states that they are rarely visible the first year, that they congregate with minnows and other small fry; the second, are found on shallows; the third summer, about seven or eight inches long; and subsequently increase rapidly to a pound or a pound and a half, dependent on the quantity and quality of their food, the season, and other circumstances.”
This gentleman has for years kept trout in a kind of store stream, and having fed them with every kind of food, has had some of them increase from one pound to ten pound in four years.
Steven Oliver, in his agreeable scenes and recollections of fly fishing, mentions a trout taken in the neighbourhood of Great Driffield, in September, 1832, which measured thirty-one inches in length, twenty-one in girth, and weighed seventeen pounds.
A few years since, a notice was sent to the Linnæan Society, of a trout that was caught on the 11th January, 1822, in a little stream, ten feet wide, branching from the Avon, at the back of Castle-street, Salisbury. On being taken out of the water, its weight was found to be twenty-five pounds. Mrs. Powell, at the bottom of whose garden the fish was first discovered, placed it in a pond, where it lived some time.
The age to which trout may arrive, has not been ascertained. Mr. Oliver mentions that in August, 1809, a trout died which had been for twenty-eight years an inhabitant of the well, in Dumbarton Castle.
A trout died in 1826, which had lived 53 years in a small well in the orchard of Mr. William Mossop, of Board Hall, near Broughton, in Furness.