G. EOOPER — THE SALMON^. 19 



appoaranoc has occasioned great confusion and nuicli heated con- 

 troversy, especially as they are inhabitants of the same waters, and 

 affect, to some extent, each other's company.* The time of their 

 remaining in the parr stage is also a subject of dispute : Mr. 

 Pennell says two or three, sometimes four, years, but my own 

 opinion is that they remain one year only. 



In the second April of their existence a change in the appear- 

 ance of the parr occurs ; he assumes the silvery scales of the adult 

 fish, wearing his new apparel over his old barred coat He is now 

 called a " smolt " — the fourth stage ; and perhaps, Avith a wish to 

 exhibit himself in his new and beautiful apparel, he evinces a 

 daily-increasing restlessness and desire to quit his home and to go 

 forth into that world of waters he may have dreamed of in his 

 ante-natal tomb. The wish is soon realized. With the first floods 

 in May myriads of these lovely little fishes start on their downward 

 journey towards the sea. It is a beautiful sight to watch their 

 movements when descending. For many days the river teems 

 with them, and not a square foot of water is without one, each, 

 when the stream is at all rapid, swimming tail first ; and as they 

 are carried down, fighting against the stream, as it were, darting 

 upwards for a foot or two, again to be carried a yard downwards. 



As fry the smolts were exposed to many dangers, but they are 

 nothing to those which beset them as parrs on their journey 

 towards the sea. Their enemies are legion. Trout and pike 

 devour them ; gulls flop down and swallow them wholesale. 

 Herons, standing mid-leg deep in the water, pick them out as 

 they pass, and even their blood-relations — fathers, mothers, uncles, 

 aunts — " kelts," as the fish after spawning are called, devour them 

 without scruple. Unluckily too for them, a certain number of 

 these hungiy kelts, having recovered to a great extent their con- 

 dition, and being convalescent as to their appetite, accompany 

 them on their seaward journey, and prey upon their young com- 

 panions as they travel. I believe that a hungry old kelt will 

 devour forty or fifty smolts in a day. It is illegal to capture, or 

 at least to appropriate if caught, one of these little fish, or the 

 ravenous monsters who prey on them — a useless and mischievous 

 prohibition to my thinking. Smolts are capital eating, and for the 

 boys great fun in catching. Of course if 100 or 1000 are taken 

 out of the river there are 100 or 1000 fewer in it, but the same 

 may be said of the river itself; take 100 or 1000 buckets-full out, 

 and there will he that number of buckets-full fewer in it. But 

 the abstraction would make no appreciable difference in the volume 

 of water. As for the kelts they are for the time barren fish. 

 Strange that the law shoiild protect the multitudinous fry and the 

 spent fish, and permit the destruction of the baggitts, heavy in 

 spawn, the teeming mothers of millions. 



* In the Ythan, a river in Aberdeenshire, a portion of which I now rent, nil 

 the trout are barred, and so remain, whatever their size. They are, how(?ver, 

 genuine trout {Scihno fario), having the distinctive blood-red mark on the 

 adipose fin. — G. R. 



