\ 



Transactions. 37 



leads the salmon to return year after year to its native stream, 

 and which has a striking parallel among birds, as in the case of 

 the swallow, but pass on to other migratory iishes, first noticing 

 the eels. Unlike the salmon, the eels spawn in the sea, if they 

 do spawn at all. At anyrate, they went down to the sea to 

 breed, and they came back again up the rivers ; and we find that 

 the elvers, or young eels, come up about the month of May in 

 large shoals. The older eels come up and run on spring tides, 

 never waiting for a spate. 



The herring migrate, not to and from the Arctic regions, as 

 was repoi-ted by all the older naturalists — worthy men in their 

 time, and who have handed down to us a lot of erroneous infor- 

 mation — but simply from deep to shallow water, and remain, I 

 believe, very near our islands all the time. Their migration is 

 very largely dependent upon temperature. To give an idea of 

 tlie extraordinary numbers of the herring, if we allow one herring 

 for every cubic foot, and assume a shoal to be a square mile in 

 extent and eighteen feet deep, it would contain five hundred 

 millions of the fish. And there were a great many shoals of 

 vastly larger dimensions. Such were their immense quantity, 

 and such their rapid rate of increase, that the' whole quantity 

 caught by man did not appreciably affect their numbers, and 

 they would choke up the .sea if they were not eaten by other fishes. 

 One of the fishes most destructive to the herring was the cod, 

 which followed the slioals, and lias Ijeen found very frequently in 

 the Solway now in the winter, at sj)ots where the iiaddock used 

 formerly to be plentiful, but from which it has disappeared. 



II. The System of Land Tenure in Scotland. 



By Mr J. W. Whitelaw. 



In this paper the author remarked that the system of land 

 tenure in Scotland was of feudal origin, but that very little 

 feudalism now remained except in nomenclature, and the theory 

 that the .sovereign is the source and fountain of all rights in the 

 land. He traced the history of Feudalism from the earliest 

 times, showing how the various changes were introduced, and 

 described the rites and ceremonies of in vesture. 



