SALMON LEGISLATION. IGl 



ber night, a greater number of fish than liad been killed 

 with the rod during the whole season (and the farther 

 up the river, the greater or more entire becomes this 

 truth), to say nothing of the far greater numbers killed 

 by poachers with the same weapon, both in and out of 

 the legal season. The antiquity of the practice, its 

 picturesqueness, and, at the same time, its odiousness to 

 eyes unaccustomed to its beauties and natures unhar- 

 dened to its butcherliness, are shown forth in these 

 cranky sentences, written 200 years ago by the Crom- 

 wellian Captain Francks : — " When the salmon goes to 

 the shallows, that is the time the prejudicate native con- 

 sults his opportunity to put in execution that barbarous 

 practice of murdering fish by moonshine, or at other 

 times to martyr them with the blaze of a wisp and a 

 barbed spear. What ! are these cannibals or murdering 

 moss-troopers to surprise fish by the engine of fire-light? 

 Such dark conspirators sprung from Fawkes or Catiline, 

 or some infernal incubus." The Rev. James Hall of 

 London, in his Travels in Scotland by an Unusual Route, 

 thus describes and comments upon the practice of salmon- 

 leistering, as witnessed by him about the beginning of 

 the present century, chiefly in Aberdeenshire, Banff", and 

 Moray : — " There is a shamefully destructive amusement 

 which the men are fond of, and which, though against 

 the law, too many of the proprietors in the upper parts 

 of the country do not discourage,^ — I mean the killing of 

 salmon in the rivers in winter, while they are spawning. 

 As by law the heritors near the mouths of rivers are en- 

 titled to do all they can to prevent fish going up the 

 rivers, so the proprietors on each side of the rivers, in 



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