130 THE SALMON. 



abandoned. The fixed-net fisheries on the firths of Moray 

 and Beauly, which more than half exhausted the rivers 

 there emptying themselves, are now, some of them, given 

 up as unprofitable, and others dwindled to a trifle, partly 

 from having been " fished out" by new fixtures farther 

 seaward, partly from the general decline in the number 

 of fish, caused by over-fishing. 



The same story has to be told of the eft'ect of stake and 

 bag nets in England and Ireland, though in both these 

 countries those eupines are of more recent introduction 



o 



than even in Scotland. In Ireland the effects were so 

 rapid and visil)le as to produce both popular tumults 

 and ultimately something that comes pretty near to 

 legislative prohibition. The reports of the English In- 

 spectors of Salmon-Fisheries are full of statements of the 

 mischief wrought 1)y these devices : for instance, in their 

 Second Report (1863), they say of a fishery on the Esk 

 in Cumberland :— " Before stake-nets were introduced it 

 w^as let for £300, but with their increase its value dimin- 

 ished ; in 1840 it let for £100, and its rent varied from 

 that sum to £70, and last year it was let at £50 only." 

 Still stronger instances of the same kind might have 

 been adduced from the same district. The Solway, on 

 its Scotch shore, is (as we shall have occasion to mention 

 more fully hereafter) the l)irthplace of that kind of stake- 

 net that was afterwards found capaljle of being made 

 to stand and work upon the open sea-shore : and the 

 Solway also affords the most conclusive evidence, not 

 only of the unfair, l)ut of th(^ ultimately self-destructive 

 operations of these engines. The first stake-net on the 

 Solway — i.e., the first fixed net with leaders and cham- 



