DECAY OF SALMON. 109 



point we speak with doubt and reservation, as being one 

 wliicli purely "practical men" will claim as exclusively 

 their own. But any man may see that, for thirty miles 

 upwards from the sea, the Tay is a mixture of firth and 

 river, running over a broad and varying channel, where 

 the route of the fish, we might surmise, can neither be 

 certainly known nor entirely commanded, and that, im- 

 mediately above the tide, the river gets so rapid and 

 rough-bottomed as, except at a few spots, to be unavail- 

 able for net-fishing. And on the other hand, we see 

 that, within a very few yards upwards from the ocean, 

 the Tweed is a comparatively narrow and shallow river 

 (it is fordable at little more than a stone-cast from the 

 shipping at Berwick quay), with a well-defined and 

 smooth -bottomed channel, so that the fish comes at once 

 within reach and even sight of his human or inhuman 

 enemy. 



The second point can be spoken to more posi- 

 tively. There can be no doul)t that the habits of the 

 Tay salmon, whether natural or constrained, and the 

 character of the human population among whom they 

 sojourn, preserve them to a very great extent from those 

 perils which prove so fatal to their brethren and sisters 

 of the Tweed. The Tay fish, for the most part, confine 

 their travels and their breeding operations to the com- 

 paratively short stream of the main river, between Perth 

 and Loch Tay (about forty miles), where they are well 

 protected by nature and by man ; while the Tweed 

 salmon extend their movements over the whole hundred 

 miles of the main river, and over at least as many miles 

 of the tributaries and sub-tributaries, where nature leaves 



