30 THE SALMON FISHERIES. 
great wealth of all this land, in avoiding the straitness of all 
rivers, so that ships and boats might have in them their large ~ 
and free passage, and a/so in safeguard of all the fry of fish 
spawned within the same.” Even here, indeed, it is not so much 
’ 
to the salmon in particular as to the “fry of fish” generally 
that these obstacles to navigation were felt to be at the 
same time detrimental. But, although the use—or rather 
the abuse—of fixed engines did undoubtedly play a 
large part in the deterioration of the English salmon 
fisheries, even here we fail to find an enemy necessarily 
fatal to them. That Parliament was wise in peremptorily 
abolishing them cannot be questioned: indeed it had 
hardly any option in the matter; for to have arbitrarily 
limited their number or position would have been to allow 
one man to exercise a public right in the use of a particular 
engine while denying it to another: and the only possible 
course was to deny altogether any public right—the 
nature of the engines themselves rendered doubtful the 
maintenance of any such right—and to save only the in- 
alienable rights of property in private fisheries. Even so, the 
exercise of the right to use these private engines was made 
subject to the understanding that they should observe an 
annual close time, and was otherwise hedged about with 
stringent conditions which largely diminished their de- 
structive powers. 
If stake» nets and such like “engines were, fer se 
necessarily fatal to the prosperity of a salmon river, then 
the fisheries of Scotland ought to be in far worse plight 
than those of England. By the peculiar conditions of the 
law in Scotland, the right to fish for salmon, not only on 
the foreshore but in the sea itself, is a private right, existing 
only in the Crown or in those who have derived their right 
from the Crown. “ There can be little doubt,” said Lord 
