SALMONS. 233 



weight. Salmon of thirty and even forty pounds 

 are by no means uncommon ; one has been killed 

 by the angler's rod which weighed sixty-nine 

 pounds and three quarters, and Mr. Yarrell has 

 recorded the occurrence of one in the London 

 market of the astonishing weight of eighty-three 

 pounds. The head of the Salmon is small, the 

 mouth not deeply cleft ; the body is thick and 

 muscular, but with graceful^ swelling outlines, 

 tapering evenly away to the tail ; the caudal fin 

 is slightly hollowed. The colours are blackish- 

 grey on the upper parts, lead-grey on the sides, 

 and silvery on the belly : a few dark spots are 

 scattered over the back ; and the fins assume the 

 same colours as the regions whence they origi- 

 nate. 



The marketable demand for this excellent fish 

 has made it the subject of important fisheries ; 

 and as it can be taken with advantage only in 

 rivers connected with territorial rights, and only 

 at the particular season already mentioned, these 

 fisheries are the subject of careful legislative pre- 

 scriptions. To describe the various modes em- 

 ployed in the capture of the Salmon in British 

 rivers alone would far exceed our space ; we can 

 do little more than allude to them. Nets of many 

 kinds, and traps of ingenious device, are sometimes 

 stretched across the stream, to arrest the fish in 

 its ascending course ; sometimes,' as in the Forth, 

 bag-nets are dropped from projecting platforms or 

 stages ; or, as in the Solway, the fishes are received 

 into funnel-shaped nets carried at the end of a 

 long pole. In the Severn, the Welsh fishermen, 

 seated in their funny little boats called coracles, 

 drag a net between two, with which they take 



