

FUTURE SALMON LEGISLATION. 183 



salmon could be caught in the sea, and not merely in 

 the rivers and estuaries, and when fisheries on the shores 

 of the sea began to be asked for and granted (which was 

 about two centuries and a half ago, the earliest charter 

 for a sea-shore salmon-fishery which has been obtained, 

 being of date 1603), no question arose about fixtures on 

 the sea-shore, because the fixed engines then known were 

 not applicable to those localities, and it was not till two 

 hundred years afterwards, or till our own days, that any 

 engines were devised capable of standing and operating 

 on the open coast. If therefore these engines are legal, 

 it is only because they are not named nor specially struck 

 at in any Act passed before they existed ; and it is only 

 through accidental omission that the Statute-law did not 

 long ago deal with them in terms of express prohibition. 

 But does the past history of salmon legislation, any 

 more than do the dictates of common sense, sanction 

 the principle that whatever is must always be ? On 

 the contrary, that history shows that, especially in re- 

 gard to fixtures, legislation suppressed from time to 

 time whatever devices were deemed unfair or injuri- 

 ous, without regard to the sanction they had received 

 either from law or antiquity. Up to the middle of the 

 fifteenth century, it would appear that fixed engines, of 

 which the only species then known were cruives and 

 yairs, were legal everywhere. They were then sup- 

 pressed in estuaries and " within flude-marke of the sea" 

 a cruive working in the full run of the fresh river 

 under certain regulations being regarded as less mischiev- 

 ous. These prohibitions were imposed at first only for a 

 specified term of years, but afterwards in perpetuity, 



