7O THE SALMON FISHERIES. 
the fish back till so late in the year that they are 
completely “out of season,” the upper proprietors show 
a not unnatural disgust, just as they would equally 
naturally do if the nets below were allowed to fish so 
late and so continuously as to practically reap the whole 
harvest. In the nature of things it is not possible for 
the upper proprietors to have a large share of the fish 
which they may be said to breed; and their demands are 
not unreasonable: they merely ask for the gleanings of 
the harvest ; they are content if they can have a little sport 
when exercising this right. As anglers, they do not like to 
be condemned to hook full or foul fish, which they are 
obliged at once to return to the water under pain of heavy 
penalties. Indeed, the fact that the salmon, which usually 
observes an almost total abstention from food during his 
sojourn in fresh waters,—at any rate while proceeding 
up-stream to spawn—should so willingly take a bait com- 
posed of a bunch of feathers unlike any insect that ever 
existed, would seem to be a special dispensation of Provi- 
dence to enable the upper proprietor to take out in sport 
what he cannot have in a commercial fishery. The angling 
rights on a mile or two of good water are often as valuable as 
a commercial net fishery taking ten times the quantity of fish; 
and the maintenance of a property of this kind, as well as 
of good feeling between all the riparian interests on a river, 
depends in large measure, first, on the removal of pollutions 
and weirs and, next, on the adjustment of fishing seasons, 
and mesh of nets, and the proper regulation of the net 
fisheries. For these various reasons the artificial breeding of 
salmon can never advantageously supplant the method of 
maintaining a salmon fishery by the restoration of a 
river to something like its natural conditions. But, as an 
aid to the scientific study of the life history of fish and to. 
