68 THE SALMON FISHERIES. 
advantage of sufficient importance to outweigh the ex- 
pense and trouble involved in artificial breeding may be 
questioned. The marvellous abundance of salmon in the 
rivers of Western America suggests a negative reply ; and 
some of our own heavily handicapped rivers seem to show 
that artificial breeding is not necessary to the maintenance 
of a fair stock of fish, The Tyne, for example, with 
terrible pollutions in all directions, with most of its tribu- 
taries more or less obstructed, nevertheless yields, with 
ordinary protection, about 50,000 fish a year, and has 
within the last dozen years produced as many as 129,000 
fish in a single season. 
On the other hand, the reports of the progress which the 
artificial hatching of salmon and other fish has made in 
Canada and the United States are very alluring. Salmon, 
shad, and whitefish have been hatched by the million 
under the immediate direction of the government officials, 
and tens of millions of young fry have been turned into 
rivers whose stock was becoming exhausted, and even into 
streams where they did not naturally exist. The placing 
of some millions of young fry into the waters even of 
a river of such marvellous productiveness as the Sacra- 
mento, for instance, during the last ten years or so has. 
been followed by such a large increase in the take of adult 
fish that the Honourable B. B. Redding reports that “with 
the aid of artificial breeding we have beaten the sea-lions, the 
canneries, and the fishermen combined.” Altogether such 
remarkable success has attended the able and energetic 
efforts of the fish-culturists—both private individuals and 
public officers—in Canada as well as the United States, 
that it is hardly surprising that this system of supplement- 
ing the forces of Nature is looked upon in some quarters as 
the Alpha and Omega of salmon preservation, as if the 
