DECAY OF SALMON. 95 



somewhere or other idmost every week, about apprentices 

 and farm-servants stipulating in their indentures and 

 otherwise not to have to eat salmon above twice a week, 

 must, w^e suppose, be true, since everybody has ahvays 

 been telling it ; but it should be mentioned that no in- 

 dentures or other written evidence to that effect have 

 ever been seen, and that even the oldest among the 

 writers who give the story, give it as a tale of other 

 days, rather than of their own. The Koyal Commis- 

 sioners of Inquiry into the Salmon Fisheries of England 

 and Wales (1860), met the story almost everywhere, 

 but its evidence nowhere. " We endeavoured," they 

 say in their Report, " to obtain a sight of one of these 

 instruments, but without success, though we met with 

 persons who stated they had seen them ; and the 

 universal prevalence of the tradition seems to justify 

 belief in it." Be that as it may, however, there is a 

 fallacy in measuring the difference between former 

 abundance and present scarcity by statements like this, 

 or comparisons between old and present prices. Some 

 people seem to forget that even since the least old of the 

 old times with which comparison has generally been 

 made, the number of mouths has at least trebled, and 

 that consequently, even if this represented, as it does not, 

 the "whole increase of consumers, there would necessarily 

 be a comparative scarcity, unless the fish had trebled 

 too. But the mouths have not only trebled, they are 

 incomparably more easily reached. In the old times, 

 though there was a glut at Berwick and Perth, there 

 might be a dearth at London, and probably an entire 

 destitution in Nottingham and Derby. There is a story 



