412 A HISTORY OF FISHES 



up by the great Izaak Walton, the father of modern angling, in 

 the following words: "No life, my honest scholar, — no life so 

 happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler"; 

 and again: "God never made a more calm, quiet, innocent 

 recreation than angling." Furthermore, the keen angler, with 

 an earnest desire to know something of the lives and habits 

 of the fishes which he catches or of the insects that he uses as 

 lures, may well be in a position to provide scientific men with 

 valuable data regarding their habits, movements, food, and so 

 on. Indeed, many of the interesting specimens offish preserved 

 in our national collection at South Kensington have found their 

 way there through the good offices of members of the angling 

 fraternity, and more than one fish hitherto unknown to science 

 has been first of all discovered by a fisherman. 



If the strictly fresh- wa^^er fishes are commercially unimportant, 

 the same cannot be said of the migratory forms such as the 

 Salmon, Sea Trout, and Eel, and it behoves us to make every 

 effort to maintain or even increase the numbers of these fishes, 

 which are believed to have declined markedly within recent 

 years. It is held by some people that artificial hatching of 

 Salmon will provide an easy and infallible remedy for any 

 amount of over-fishing, but so far there is no definite evidence 

 that the yield of any river has been maintained or improved 

 by this method of cultivation. It seems far more likely that a 

 careful regulation of the fisheries, coupled with a thorough 

 knowledge of the life histories of the fishes concerned, will do 

 more towards improving the stocks than any amount of hatching 

 and stocking. To improve the fisheries it is necessary to regulate 

 the netting, so as to allow of the passage of a reasonable number 

 of adult fish to propagate their kind and to satisfy the angler; 

 the journey of the fish to the spawning grounds in the upper 

 waters must be facilitated as far as possible; and finally, the 

 fish must be protected while engaged in spawning. As far as 

 the netting is concerned, a good deal has already been carried 

 out, and serious over-fishing practically stopped. The removal 

 of obstructions of all kinds, whether natural or artificial, lying 

 between the fish and the spawning beds, is of the greatest 

 importance, and it is in this direction that action is urgently 

 required on many rivers. Such natural obstacles as waterfalls 

 may provide a complete barrier to the ascent of Salmon or 

 Sea Trout, and those of the artificial kind, such as dams, dykes, 

 and weirs, are even more numerous. The remedy lies in the 

 provision of some type of Salmon pass, ladder or lift, to facilitate 



