8 THE SALMON. 



years ago ; while in Scotland the property, besides having 

 legal recognition equally ancient, has in multitudes of 

 cases been separated for centuries from the soil, to which 

 indeed it had in some cases never been attached, and 

 has scores of times been separately bought and sold, 

 divided and subdivided. The total value of the salmon- 

 fisheries of the United Kingdom, as property, has, owing 

 to a variety of difficulties, never been ascertained. In 

 England, indeed, the value had lately become so small 

 as scarcely to be worth reckoning or asking about. Of 

 Ireland, the Irish Fishery Commissioners reported a 

 few years ago : — " We have no means of obtaining an 

 account of the aggregate annual value of the salmon- 

 fisheries ;" but the value for Ireland has since then been 

 stated semi-officially at about £200,000 a year, and 

 rapidly increasing. On the other hand, a recent Eeturn 

 (Pari. Paper, No. 227, Sess. 1863), purporting to give 

 the name, owner, and poor-law valuation of every fishery 

 in Ireland, brings out the not very grand total of 

 £12,307, 15s. ! The tremendous disparity between 

 these two statements is in part to be accounted for by 

 the larger proportion of the Irish fisheries consisting of 

 what is called " common fisheries," and so not rateable 

 as property, and by many especially of the bag-net 

 fisheries being divided into such small shares as to leave 

 no one of the owners with what is termed a " con- 

 siderable," w^hich seems practically to mean a rateable 

 fishery. Indeed, we know of one Irish fishery, the rent 

 of which is not much less than half of the whole sum 

 which this Parliamentary Return gives as the rental of 

 all the hundreds of fisheries in Ireland. All that can l^e 



