112 SALMONID^ OF BRITAIN. 



very destructive to salmon eggs, while salmon-kelts destroy trout, and eels have 

 been accused of doing great injury.* 



Respecting the salmon fisheries of the British Isles no accurate statistics exist, 

 and fancy seems occasionally to have filled in what facts were unable to demon- 

 strate. The annual value of these fisheries has been estimated at the present time 

 to be as follows :— England £100,000, Scotland £250,000, and Ireland £400,000. 

 They are divisible into those of the fresh waters and such as are carried on in 

 estuaries or in the sea. The Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Salmon 

 Fisheries of England and Wales in 1860 stated that they " found the fisheries 

 generally in a state of lamentable depression." While Mr. Willis-Band, in May, 

 1886, remai'ked, " There is no river in England and Wales where each rod fisher- 

 man on the present return catches a yearly average of ten salmon." Also it had 

 been observed by Mr. Eden, Fortnightly lievieiu, Nov. 1st, 1881, that taking nine 

 rivers in 1880, those who had bred the fish took 1237, those who netted them 

 52,563. In the Severn, rods captured 15 fish and nets 16,000, including the 

 estuary. 



It has been questioned whether the amount of salmon in our rivers is really 

 much less than was formerly the case. It can be shown that they have been 

 exterminated from the Stour, the Itchon, the Medway, the Avon, and the Thamesf 

 in England. In Scotland, the Pifeshire Leven no longer contains salmon, in the 

 Tay district the Almond, Ericht and Dighty are ruined from pollutions, and many 

 other rivers are greatly injured. Mr. Blake, in 1874, writing of his Irish district, 

 extending from Wicklow Head to Rossan Point, stated that due to pollutions nearly 

 every river in the County Down had been destroyed as a salmon producer. While 

 stopping pollutions has been found so difficult and expensive, that the polluters 

 appear to have it all then' own way. 



Although many authors have of late years held that the widely-spread belief 

 that laws formerly existed prohibiting giving salmon to servants or apprentices 

 more than three times a week was a popular fallacy, it seems more probable that 

 it is the recent authors themselves who are in error.f What the reasons may 



in preserving that river from 1860 to 1880, and some salmon came back to it, but the white trout 

 never. It was full of brown trout, and, in the autumn, of the big lake trout ; but the salmon and 

 white trout, that it used to be famous for before "the bad times" (1848 to 1854), never came back. 

 The head waters of these rivers were quite changed in the draining works about that time, and 

 some say this was the reason. This I would believe, but that elsewhere in Ireland there has been 

 a similar failure on rivers where there have not been any drainage works. Taking away the eel- 

 weirs I suspect must be detrimental to the salmon and white trout, as there are no greater 

 destroyers than the eels." 



* The returns of the number of boxes of British and Irish salmon, averaging 112 lb. each, sent 

 to Billingsgate Market, give the following results for the last ten years : — 



1876. 1877. 1878. 1879. 1880. 1881. 1882. 1883. 1884. 1885. 

 Enghsh and Welsh ... 1508 1G08 1224 1898 2028 1890 2186 2271 1600 1897 



Scotch 25,645 29,366 27,660 15,564 17,457 23,905 22,968 34,506 27,219 30,362 



Irish 7064 6373 4273 5762 9669 10,633 4720 9033 5979 8375. 



t Captain Eichard Franks, in his Northern Memoirs, edition 1821, p. 133, writing of Stirling 

 in 1658, remarked that "burgomasters, as in many other parts of Scotland, are compelled to 

 reinforce an ancient statute, that commands all masters and others not to force or compel any 

 servant or an apprentice to feed upon salmon more than thrice a week." At Inverness a century 

 later Burt tells us {Letters from the North of Scotland, 1754) salmon which sold at one penny a 

 13ound "was by a late regulation of the magistrates raised to twopence a pound, which is 

 thought by many to be an exorbitant price" (p. 121), "the meanest servants, who are not at 

 board wages, will not make a meal upon salmon if they can get anything else to eat " (p. 129) — ■ 

 mutton and beef were then about one jjenny a jiound. Sir Walter Scott {Old Mortality, 1816) stated, 

 " At that period (1679), salmon was caught in such plenty in the considerable rivers of Scotland 

 that instead of being accounted a delicacy, it was generally applied to feed the servants who are 

 said sometimes to have stipulated that they should not be requested to eat a food so luscious and 

 surfeiting in its quality over iive times a week " (cap. viii). 



In Notes and Queries for May, 1857, the following quotation was given from Coursell's 

 History of Gloucester : — " It was a standing condition of apprenticeship that the apprentice should 

 not be obliged to eat salmon more than thrice a week, the object being to render him less liable to 

 the leprosy, which after the crusades in the Middle Ages was a formidable disease, that was 

 supposed to be brought on or aggravated by the eating of fish." In a History of Worcester (1808, 

 p. 48), the existence of this proviso was asserted as a well-known fact. The late Thomas Bewick, 

 the great wood engraver, in a letter dated April 26th, 1824, wrote as follows to Mr. Pease, banker, 



