52 THE SALMON. 



found a few individual exceptions to his second-year 

 theory, and as the advancing season, witli its increased 

 supplies of food, does give to all kinds of fish a clearer 

 complexion or gayer coat, which might in many cases 

 be mistaken, especially by those not disinclined to the 

 discovery, for the sea-going garb of the smolt. Further, 

 when the second year came round, it was found that the 

 remaining fish had changed their appearance by the 26 th 

 of April {i.e., a week earlier than the time when no such 

 symptoms could be detected in the fish of one year old) ; 

 they were going off in shoals by the 28th of April, and 

 were all gone before the 24th of May— the migration of 

 the fish of two years old being thus finished at a period 

 of the season at which fish of one year had, according to 

 the statements of the one-year champions themselves, 

 scarcely begun to show the slightest symptoms of change. 

 This was a fact pretty strong against the one-year theor- 

 ists, but it was liable to the deduction or doubt arising 

 from the great difierence of seasons as to temperature ; 

 and the facts of the years that have passed since go to 

 confirm the observations and twofold conclusions of the 

 first year of the experiments. These facts have been 

 most carefully noted and clearly recorded by Mr. Robert 

 Buist of Perth, a gentleman who, from his long experience, 

 his powers of observing, and his caution in coming to 

 decisions, has done much service in the matter of the 

 salmon, both as to natural history and commercial in- 

 terests. The results, then, to which the evidence of the 

 Stormontfield ponds seems to lead, in the question as to 

 the period at which the young of the salmon makes its 

 first migration, are chiefly these : one-half of the young 



