222 THE SALMON. 



industry ; besides which, the subject is treated with the 

 care and minuteness it requires in the recent volumes of 

 Mr. Frank Buckland and Mr. Francis Francis. There is 

 no dispute, however, as to the fact that the results in 

 France have been great ; there is not the slightest reason 

 to doubt that they will be proportionally great here ; and 

 that those who have laboured and are labouring to in- 

 crease and improve this mode of producing food, are 

 labouring for a great public good. If he is a national 

 benefactor who makes two blades grow in place of one, 

 what shall be said of him who makes ten thousand fish 

 swim where only two fish swam before ? 



Of course, as in all other things, and especially in all 

 the beginnings of things, there have been and will be 

 some mistakes chiefly, as we think, in the matter of 

 acclimatization, or the transplanting, so to speak, of the fish 

 from one country or district where it is indigenous to an- 

 other where it is exotic. To populate where the inhabitants 

 had become extinct or scarce, is quite a different thing 

 from bringing in some new race among a piscine com- 

 munity already sufficiently numerous for the local means 

 of livelihood. In waters not actually poisoned, or other- 

 wise artificially desolated, the number or amount of resi- 

 dent fish is, generally speaking, regulated by the amount 

 of food ; and to bring more fish to a river so conditioned 

 does not in the end really operate as an increase of the 

 quantity of fish, but only as a change of the kind. In 

 many cases the change may be for the better ; in all cases 

 where it is practicable, it would be well to cultivate salmon 

 and trout, for instance, to the displacing of chub and perch. 

 But sometimes we see an opposite course adopted, and 



