1828.] Salmon Fisheries 'of Great Britain. 227 



' On reaching the points that appear favourable for their purpose, they 

 appear to pair, and prepare for their labours. The female is attended 

 sometimes by more than one male, though not more than one at a time. 

 They construct a bed of perhaps twelve feet by eight or ten sometimes 

 only one pair of salmon, sometimes two or three. They begin by making 

 a furrow, working up the gravel against the stream ; they cannot work 

 with their heads down the stream, for the water going into their gills the 

 wrong way drowns them. When the furrow is made, they separate, and 

 go one on each side of it ; then throwing themselves on their sides, and 

 rubbing against each other, they shed the spawn into the furrow both at 

 once. When one furrow is thus completed, they commence another, 

 and so on, till the whole is covered. The operation takes up ten or 

 twelve days ; and when completed, the fish (now taking the name of 

 kelts) go to the adjoining pools, apparently to recruit themselves for they 

 are left in a miserably exhausted state. In about a fortnight or three 

 weeks, the males begin to make their way down the river ; the females 

 not till some considerable time after February, March, April, but 

 chiefly in March. From their enfeebled condition, they take the easy 

 water near the banks, and, as they approach the tides, from the same 

 cause they are observed to go into the mid-channel, thus slowly reaching 

 the sea, and for a season are no longer traceable. 



Let us now return to the spawn, which we left buried, some inches 

 deep, in the gravel the egg about the size of a pea. By degrees, this 

 pea for so it is called swells to the size of a magpie's egg ; and early 

 in the spring, with the first vernal warmth of the sun's beams, the young 

 fry break from their enclosure. The'head of the fish remains, for some 

 time, attached to the shell in the gravel ; but the tail rises upwards, shoot- 

 ing up between the stones the spawning-ground resembling, as one of 

 the witnesses phrased it, a bed of young onions ; or, in the language of a 

 Scotch evidence, the thick briand of a well manured field ; and, by the 

 end of March or the beginning of April, the young fry are wholly 

 released, and sporting, in full life and liberty, in the neighbouring 

 pools. 



. Not long, however, do they loiter here their destiny is the sea ; and, 

 in the month of April, and sometimes so late as the beginning of May, 

 the young fry called smelts, or smalts' are now seen commencing 

 their course downwards ; stealing, like the kelts, along the margin of the 

 stream, till, reaching the influence of the tide, and tasting the salt water, 

 they linger a few days ; and then, again, like the kelts, plunging into the 

 depth of the mid-channel, they glide onwards, till they mingle in the 

 ocean, and are lost for a time. 



But again, about two months afterwards in June in the mouths 

 of the rivers, and in the rivers themselves, appear probably the very same 

 young fry, under the name of grilses, weighing from one pound to two ; 

 growing rapidly from week to week, till, by September, they will reach 

 the weight of eight or nine pounds. That these grilses are salmon, and 

 the smolts of the same season, there appears to be little room for doubt 

 among those who are most familiar with the habits of the fish ; some, 

 indeed, are of another opinion, and affect to find differences of shape in 

 the head, and fins, and tails but differences, according to their own 

 acknowledgment, not greater than frequently exist among individuals 

 allowed by themselves to be salmon. These grilses are every where 

 known also by the name of salmon-peal, as if theffeneral feeling was they 



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