The British rivers in which the salmon abound are the Severn, the Wye, the Tweed, the Tay, the Don, and the Dee, with many of their tributaries, and in Ireland, the Shannon. Besides these, many of the watercourses of lesser note adjoining the coast have been renowned for their salmon fisheries. Some of the Scottish rivers, especially, are famous for the size and quality as well as numbers of salmon. In days not very distant from ours, farm servants made it a condition of their hiring that salmon should not be served to them more than three days in the week. These times are changed. In the districts in which this condition was the most stringently insisted on, the proprietors derive a princely revenue from this source alone. The Tay fisheries yield a revenue of seventeen thousand pounds per annum. The Spey, for its length the richest in Scotland, produces twelve thousand pounds per annum. The river is only a hundred and twenty miles from its source to the sea, and its picturesque banks are celebrated in a local ballad, which says, not very harmoniously, that
"Dipple, Dundurcus, Dandaleith, and Dulocq,
Are the bonniest haughs of the run of the Spey;"
but there's "no standing water in the Spey!" The river drains thirteen hundred miles of mountains, many of whose bases are more than a thousand feet above the level of the sea. The Tweed, which has been "poached" and plundered, by its proprietors using unfair implements, until there was scarcely a fish in its upper waters, is slowly recovering under legislative enactments, and its rental is now seven thousand five hundred pounds.
Salmon abounds in the Loire and its affluents, but is much more rare in the Seine and Marne. They enter the Rhine and the Elbe, and most of the great rivers of the north of Europe. In France they were formerly found in the rivers of Brittany, and in the Gironde. They are now very rare in these rivers. The coast of Picardy is well furnished, but they are rare in Upper and Lower Normandy. In Norway, especially in the district of Drontheim, the salmon fishery is conducted on a large scale on the sea-shore as well as in the interior waters. The Baltic is rich in salmon. Considerable fisheries are carried on in the waters of the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, as well as in the waters of Swedish Laponia. The takes vary every year; in 1860 being much above the average throughout Great Britain, or as in 1772, when the fish were so scarce in the Tweed, that it was believed they had gone off the coast. They invariably go to leeward with the wind, and have been caught a hundred miles off land. Salmon are in condition at various periods of the year, apparently not depending on the latitude of the rivers. Thus the Tay is one of the earliest rivers, while the North and South Esk are the latest, yet they debouch within a few miles of each other. It is the opinion of Mr. Joseph Johnston of Montrose (whose acknowledged fifty years' practical experience carries weight with it in all fishery parliamentary committees) that the Stormontfield ponds, by artificially rearing the parr, render them more helpless when they commence river life on their own account. As a natural result, the death-ratio is enormously increased—cui bono? especially when the parr have only the option of leaving, and are not compelled to go out. We must, therefore, receive Dr. Bertram's narrative, much as we respect his authority, with some reserve. A seed will not grow, nor will a parr ever become a grilse, unless under given conditions: it is therefore an easy matter to explain the anomaly of a parr passing seaward becoming a four-pound grilse, while its twin-brother remaining in the breeding-pond is conditionally developed as only a half-ounce samlet, yet none the less a dwarfed grilse—the possibility of growth existing all the while, although it was not actively evoked by physical surroundings.
The modes of procedure in salmon fishery are very various. Spearing with tridents, and liestering with a weighted hook by torch-light, "burning the water," as the Scotch have it, as well as trammel, wear, and cruive-wear fishing, are now prohibited. Legal fishing in rivers is confined to row nets, and fly and bait rod fishing, fixtures being illegal since 1810. Wear shot; a larger and heavier row-net placed at the meeting of the waters; stake, fly, and bag-nets are used in the open sea. The latter is most in vogue, the former being almost superseded by the fly. Fixtures on the sea coast were held to be legal in Lord Kintore's case by House of Lords in 1828, and continued so till the passing of the recent Act. By this act all legal modes of fishing are in action from the first of February to the fourteenth of September, a period, however, now curtailed by twenty-eight days,—netting being illegal from Saturday to Monday in each week. It remains to be seen whether the gourmet will enjoy his salmon better after its Sabbath rest; perhaps its ragout will then haunt him as it did Talleyrand's abbé, who, instead of the mea culpa of the Confiteor, iterated, "Ah! le bon saumon! ah! le bon saumon!"
A bag-net is composed of three chambers; the first, which is the widest, is at the entrance. The next is the doubling, and is one inch to the mesh narrower than the outer. The last is the fish court, where the fish by a simple and ingenious contrivance are prevented from finding the door by which they entered. It is partly floated by corks and partly by an empty cask on the head or principal riding rope. It is set in the sea by ropes attached to anchors, one anchor rope to the head of the net and one on each wing at the entrance of the bag. The bag-leader is a separate net held by a rope and anchor on the land side, and is fastened to the bag net. The principle of fishing is this: the tide makes a curve on the leader of the bag, in this curve the fish swim into the net. Bags are adapted for any kind of coast, and six or seven are run out to sea end on. Fly nets are the same as bags in principle, but slightly altered so as to adapt them for being fixed to stakes driven into the sand instead of being moored by rope and anchor; they are always used where the tide ebbs. Stake nets are expensive, and seldom used now-a-days. When in fishing trim they are, however, more deadly than fly nets: their chambers are three times as large, but the principle of fishing in bag and stake nets is identical, leaders being used in all. It is noteworthy that trout are never caught in these leaders.
ESOCIDÆ.
This family includes the Pike, which, being a fresh-water fish, need not now occupy our attention; it includes also the singular genus Stomias, and the Flying-fish, Exocœtus.
The Stomias have a body much elongated, the muzzle being very short, the mouth very deeply cleft, the opercula reduced to small membranous laminæ; the maxillarius fixed to the cheek; the inter-maxillary palatine and maxillary bones are rather sparingly furnished with teeth, and those are long and hooked. Similar teeth are observable on the tongue. The ventral fins are placed far back, and the dorsal fin is placed opposite the anal fin, on the hinder extremity of the body.