i8o THE SEA-TROUT 



grounds are adequate, attempt to restore or enhance the stock by the 

 establishment of a hatchery. It is extremely doubtful if even very 

 extensive, and therefore proportionately costly, hatching operations 

 would maintain the stock in face of continuing and possibly increasing 

 evils. In the circumstances supposed, expenditure would most 

 economically be devoted to attacking the evil, for, if it were once 

 removed, or minimised, nature would speedily restore the stock without 

 adventitious aid. 



But salmon hatcheries have an experimental and educative value 

 which it would be a mistake to under-estimate, and if they did no more 

 than give the anglers of a district a clearer idea of the economies of 

 fish life then money spent upon them, within reason, would I think be 

 money well spent. 



There is more to be said in favour of the establishment of sea-trout 

 hatcheries as useful adjuncts to sea-trout waters. Elsewhere in this 

 book I have shown that the sea-trout is essentially a " homing " fish, 

 and, as the species as a rule seldom goes very far afield in the sea, one 

 might say that the stock is as much under the eye of careful and 

 observant management as the stock of non-migratory trout anywhere is. 



Now a stock of sea-trout is peculiarly liable to suffer from the 

 vicissitudes of our variable weather. Unlike salmon, sea-trout prefer 

 to spawn in the most trifling little burns, and hardly any year passes in 

 which the deposited eggs do not suffer from floods or frost in winter, 

 or the fry from drought in summer. This was brought sharply home 

 to those in Scotland interested in sea-trout within recent years, for 

 enormous numbers of sea-trout fry perished in the spawning burns in 

 the phenomenally dry summers of iqii, iqi3 and 1914. 



There is therefore a good deal to he said for the establishment of 

 a hatchery, in which can be placed the ova taken from ripe wild fish, 

 and whence can be distributed in spring-fed burns, which do not flood 

 and do not dry up, the fry that are reared in security up to that stage. 



