RECENT RESEARCH UPON SALMON 233 
incumbent upon those who hold his view to prove—first, that 
spent salmon are physically capable of doing the alleged 
mischief ; and secondly, that they have been detected in the 
act. As to the last, there is the negative testimony of Mr. 
T. G. Thompson, printed in the Fifteenth Annual Report of 
the English Salmon-Fisheries Inspectors :— 
“‘ During the past two springs I have carefully watched kelts 
and smolts when congregated in very large numbers in the same 
pool above a weir, where they were imprisoned on account of 
there not being enough water to take them over the sill of the 
weir. ‘The smolts were swimming peaceably about and without 
harm among the kelts, as if fully aware that the cannibal in- 
stincts attributed to their full-grown relations were not to be 
feared by them in the least.” 
Probably, of all the legal enactments for the preservation of 
salmon, except those securing a free passage over obstructions, 
none has done more to palliate the results of excessive net- 
fishing than the protection afforded to kelts during the last 
forty years. It has been the chief means of saving a stock of 
mature fish in such rivers as have not been specially managed 
in the interests of angling. 
Kelts, although unseasonable fish, are mature salmon ; the 
more of these that are allowed to return to the sea, the greater 
the chance of some of them revisiting the rivers, increased 
in size. It was, therefore, not unreasonable in those who 
successfully advocated the protection of kelts, to predict an 
increase in the maximum weight of fish captured. The 
prediction has been amply fulfilled. It will hardly be disputed 
that salmon, especially spring and summer fish, were far more 
numerous in the Tweed sixty years ago than they are now. 
Except in unusually wet seasons, when a succession of floods 
enable fish to run past the nets in the estuary and lower 
reaches, the spring rod-fishing in that once famous river is now 
of small account ; and as for summer angling, it is practically at 
anend. Yet there has been a notable increase in the weights 
