SEA TROUT PROBLEMS.
The precise zeal of the British sportsman and naturalist is well illustrated by a work now in progress in the Outer Heb- rides. It is desired to probe further into the life history of the sea trout. We have advanced a long way, thanks chiefly to the Scottish Fishery Board, in our knowledge of the life of the salmon. A minute or two with a microscope and a single scale enable some of our specialists—one of the best is a retired schoolmaster—to infer the age and career of a mature salmon. Like the eel, whose biography is the strangest in the annals of natural history, the salmon alternates between fresh and salt water—a change that would kill most other varieties (with the especial exception of the stickleback !). The sea trout has similar habits, but it has not been studied with such care as the salmon till the last year or so. To-day the scales are scraped from most of the bigger fish taken from one loch and are sent up for inspection. Other fish are care- fully marked and put back, with the hope, especially, of finding out their rate of growth. I hear from a fisherman just returned from Uist that one of the biggest of the marked fish recaught recently had increased in weight by exactly a pound a year ; and the ratio of growth was fifty per cent. in eighteen months.
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