90 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



means of enforcing them should occupy more of their 

 attention than these have hitherto done. 



Mr. Duncan Dorroch, more than twenty years ago, 

 reported to the then Commissioners, at their request, as 

 regards his own river the Torridon upon similar subjects, 

 and Mr. Grimble speaks in high terms of the sensible 

 nature of all his remarks ; but since then nothing has been 

 done. Granting there are difficulties to overcome mostly, 

 we fear, commercial and political (?) surely some step might 

 have been made in the right direction, and the matter not 

 left so completely stranded as it undoubtedly has been. 



As regards the fixing of the limits of the various 

 estuaries, alas, there still appears to be the same listless, 

 short-sighted policy, and letting drift the old, old reports of 

 the Commissioners of the Act of 1862. Mr. Grimble wisely 

 advises that this should promptly be revised (v. pp. 26 and 

 27). He also instances the Beauly as a river participating 

 in some measure with the Ness in the advantages of a 

 far-out limit. Interested parties have since applied to have 

 this estuary shifted seven miles farther up a very decidedly 

 retrograde proposal. And now, the poor seals get the 

 heavy end of the reproach, whereas in all common sense 

 surely there might be enough fish for both the seal and 

 the salmon-fisher. Where there are no salmon there are 

 less likely to be seals at least on the East Coast estuaries. 

 We hope we will never see the day when any such retro- 

 grade legislation will be passed ; as if we do, then the 

 later state of our Salmon Commissioners will prove to be 

 worse than the earlier ones, who fixed (" for ever ") these 

 absurd limits of many of our rivers, to apparently suit the 

 palates of the epicures and the pockets of the netsmen. 



Now, it is over forty years since a far-seeing and most 

 able essay was written by Murdo Mackenzie, the old laird 

 of Dundonnel "A View of the Salmon Fishery of Scotland" 

 (Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, I 860). 



Since that able essay appeared, instead of any improve- 

 ment having been made by our salmon legislators, every- 

 thing has been steadily, and at some localities rapidly, 

 going from bad to ten times worse. Strange that one of 

 these rapidly declining river -fisheries should be that from 



