234 BRITISH FRESH-WATER FISHES 
of individual fish. William Scrope, writing in 1843, said that 
of the many hundreds of salmon which fell to his share in 
the Tweed, not one pulled the scale to thirty pounds. He 
describes, indeed, how in 1815 Robert Kerse hooked a clean 
salmon of ‘about forty pounds” in the Makerstoun water ; 
but that fish never came to the scale; for, although Rob 
landed him after having “sair work wi’ him for some hours,” 
the salmon escaped while his captor was looking fora stone to 
fell him with. Nowadays, thirty-pounders may be termed 
frequent in the Tweed ; never a season passes without forty- 
pounders being recorded, and there can be no doubt about the 
accuracy of the following weights of fish killed by fly-fishing. 
1873. A salmon of 534 lb. Captor not recorded. 
1886. One of 573 lb. killed by Mr. Pryor on the Floors water. 
1889. One of 55 lb. killed by Mr. Brereton on the Willowbush, 
Mertoun (a favourite cast of Scrope’s). 
1892. One of 513 Ib. killed at Birgham by Col. the Hon. W. Home. 
Depend upon it, had Scrope heard of fish such as these he 
would have gossiped about them in his own delightful way, 
and he could not have failed to hear of them, had they been 
taken, for nowhere is rumour more fleet than by the riverside 
among anglers. I fail to imagine any cause for the increase of 
weight here manifest, except that the protection of spent fish 
has enabled some of them to attain a greater age, with a 
proportionate increase in avoirdupois. If that is so, would it 
not be a disastrous error to withdraw that protection, upon the 
@ priori ground that kelts devour their own young ? 
Several points of interest in the life-history of the salmon 
have been elucidated, or brought near elucidation, by the 
researches of the German ichthyologists and the Edinburgh 
Committee. Among others is that of the well-known change 
of colour after the fish leaves the sea. Its coat, when it 
ascends the river, is indescribably pure and bright, the silvery 
tone being imparted by the deposit under the scales of an 
