FISH AND FISHERIES. 153 



About the time that M. Coste was succeeding in his experiments Mr. 

 Thomas Ashworth, of Cheshire, who with his brother was the owner of 

 the Galway Salmon Fishery, commenced his operations. In a very short 

 time — less than ten years — he had stocked with salmon various streams 

 that previously had no salmon in them, as well as a district in their 

 fishery 30 miles long by 10 wide.* 



Scotland has also of late years done much for her fisheries. The 

 establishment of Stormontfield, on the Tay, is now according to the late 

 Mr. Buckland, a household word, and the observations both practical and 

 scientific made by Messrs. Buist &, Brown are of the highest import- 

 ance. At a very small expense hundreds of millions of ova have been 

 hatched and distributed. To give an example of what this has effected : 

 in 1828 the rental of the fishery proprietors of the Tay was £14,574 ; 

 it gradually fell off every year afterwards until 1852, when it reached 

 £7,953, or nearly one-half; in 1853 the artificial rearing commenced ; 

 in 1858 the rental rose to £11,487, and in 1862 it had i-eached the value of 

 1828. This rise was not due to the increase of the value of salmon, be- 

 cause the increased price arose from scarcity, and the other fisheries 

 which had not been re-stocked presented a gradually falling rental, f 

 Things have improved generally throughout England, Scotland, and 

 Ireland since those days. There salmon was rare and dear, and far in 

 arrear of the demand, and though the London market alone has incx-eased 

 amazingly meanwhile, the salmon supply has kept pace with it. Not 

 only that, but the rivers of Scotland especially are apparently more abund- 

 antly stocked than ever in this century, and rivers which had been 

 cleared of salmon are now full again, f The last salmon caught in the 

 Thames, says Mr. Buckland (writing in 1863), was nearly fifty years ago. 

 He was caught at Windsor, and weighed 20 lbs. George IV bought him 

 for twenty guineas. The mud and sewerage of the Thames has some- 

 what impeded the re- stocking of the river. 



The salmon which, we use so abundantly in the Colonies, and which 

 comes to us in the well-known tin cases, is Onchorrhyncus quinnat, a fish 

 which only differs from the salmon in the increased number of anal rays, 

 which always number more than fourteen. All the species are migratory, 

 ascending rivers flowing into the Pacific from the northern portions of 

 the American and Asiatic continent. There are annually many millions 

 of these fishes preserved, or as they call it "tinned," on the Sacramento 

 and Columbia Bivers, but the supply is kept up by the artificial hatch- 

 ing and liberation of what is estimated to be two and a half millions of 



* For a full account of these successes see "A Treatise on the Pi'Ojjagatiou of 

 Salmon and other Fish," by Edward and Thomas Ashworth, London. Simijkin & 

 Marshall, 1853. 



t See Natural History of the Salmon as ascertained by the recent experiments 

 on the artificial spawning and hatching of the ova and rearing of the fry, at Stor- 

 montfield, on the Tay. Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., London, 1858. By W. 

 Brown. 



X The value of the salmon fishei'ies in 1871 was as follows : — England, £90,000 • 

 Ireland, £400,000 ; Scotland, £200,000. The sales at Billingsgate market for the 

 same year were 1,764 tons of salmon, valued at £246,925, which is a little less 

 than the a\^erage annual sale in London. 



U 



