FATTENING FOR SALMON. 299 



German forests, or of fossil deer from the Thames bed, 

 are largo when placed alongside the heads from Eng- 

 lish parks and Scotch forests. 



The same rule holds good with rivers, '' The larger 

 the river the bigger the fish," and the Tay and Ehine 

 are about equal in their products of very large salmon. 

 The reason of this, of course, is, that the big kelts, after 

 spawning, do not so readily succumb to the diseases 

 which usually kill them. In both instances the Ehine 

 and the Tay are kept going with a perpetual flow of 

 water from lakes. The kelts get washed down into the 

 sea very soon after spawning, and therefore recover 

 their condition quickly. Much also depends on the food 

 of the kelts to make them grow. The estuary of the 

 Tay is composed of, for the most part, sand, which sand 

 contains an immense number of sand-eels and smelts. 

 Feeding on these, the salmon quicklypick up in condition. 

 Cattle dealers know quite well what pasturage will 

 feed up cattle quickly. Fatting ground for lean cattle 

 is principally land which was once an estuary of a river. 

 I give three examples of this. The beef of Norfolk is 

 splendid, the animals having fed up well on the grasses 

 growing on the alluvial soil of the neighbom-hood. 

 Splendid beasts can be seen from the railway between 

 Yarmouth and Norwich. The Essex marshes also fat 

 up cattle well ; and as the express runs across the great 

 Bridgwater flats, the passenger will see that the fatting 

 grounds for the cattle of tlie west of England lie in this 

 locality. 



By the same rule, the fatting grounds for the salmon 

 of the Tay and Ehine are of very first-class quality. 

 Next to these come the salmon pasturages of the Severn. 

 Those terribly destructive nets, the "hose nets," in 

 Bridgwater Bay, that annually destroy myriads of the 



