DECAY OF SALMON. 103 



ing downward movement, a suspicion if not a convic- 

 tion arose, that such a state of things neither could nor 

 ought to be of long continuance. 



The Grilse column presents somewhat different fea- 

 tures, having in its earlier stages a hue of prosperity, 

 which, however, proves to have been but the symptom of 

 an undermined constitution. It will be seen that, from 

 the beginning of the period down to about 1845, while 

 the produce in adult salmon was undergoing that rapid 

 decay which continued at least till the new legislation, 

 the produce in grilse was fully maintained, the period 

 1841-45 being nearly as high as any quinquennial period 

 preceding indeed the year 1842 was the highest grilse 

 year ever known. But what was the meaning of this 

 prosperity, taken in connexion with a decrease in the 

 number of the adults ? In the period 1841-45, the 

 annual average take of adult salmon was less than 

 19,000, while the average of grilse was more than 

 81,000, and the disproportion is still greater in some 

 of the preceding years. The fact thus appears, that the 

 apparent prosperity in grilse, which prevailed till within 

 the last ten years of the period, had this ominous mean- 

 ing, that of the whole number of the salmon species killed 

 after having visited the sea (i.e., excluding the innumerable 

 multitudes killed in the infantile or parr and smolt states) 

 nearly four-fifths were, and probably still are, killed 

 before marriage. This process, naturally a very short 

 and sharp one, reached its point of culmination about 

 1845. The annual average of the produce of grilse in 

 the quinquennial period ending with that year, was, as 

 we have seen, 81,000, having increased between a third 



