FIXED ENGINES versus MOVABLE NETS. 27 
tion: neither can they turn back and go by another road. 
They are on the horns of a dilemma, from which escape is 
impossible. They quietly submit to force majeure, and have 
their revenge by dying out altogether. Of course it is not 
only against fixed engines that this indictment may be 
urged. Movable nets, with small meshes, may be used in 
such numbers, and -so continuously by relays of men, as 
practically to block the mouth of a river; but men’s arms 
tire, and their intervals of rest give opportunities to the 
salmon which the fixed engines, never sleeping, observing 
no Sabbath, and always fishing, deny them. 
Movable nets, again, are more susceptible of regulation 
than fixed engines. The use of fixed engines implies the 
use of the soil for erecting and maintaining them. In 
England and Ireland the law recognises the right of the 
public to fish, without let or hindrance, in the waters of the 
sea; but the employment of fixed engines practically 
restricts this right, so far as the area which they im- 
mediately control is concerned, to the persons erecting 
them. Such persons, therefore, when they do not enjoy the 
exclusive right to the foreshore by virtue of a royal grant 
or charter, are trespassers upon the public rights, and, 
apart from any injury they may inflict on the fisheries, 
the engines they erect are fit objects for the exercise of 
public indignation. But everybody’s duty became nobody’s 
duty in this as in other matters: fixed engines were 
tolerated, and, as the knowledge of their capacity to take 
large quantities of fish at little cost of time, trouble, or 
money, extended, their use became more and more 
general. The first great stand against the use of fixed 
engines, as such, for the capture of salmon, was made on 
the Tyne, where their use was introduced about the year 
1838 or 1839. Simultaneously with their introduction, the 
