36 THE EFFECT OF RAPID TRANSIT. [CHAP. n. 



quence of the enhanced value of land. At the period to 

 which I have been alluding there was a much greater water 

 surface than there is now rivers were broader and deeper, and 

 so also were our lakes and marshes. In those early days, 

 although not so early as the remote uncultivated age of which 

 I have spoken, there were great inland stews populous with 

 fish, especially in connection with monasteries and other reli- 

 gious houses, many examples of which, in their remains, are 

 still to be seen in England or on the Continent. In fact, fish 

 commerce, in despite of many curious industries connected 

 with the productiveness of the fisheries, was not really de- 

 veloped till a few years ago, when the railway system of car- 

 riage began. Even up to the time of George Stephenson 

 commerce in fish was generally speaking a purely local busi- 

 ness, except in so far as the fishwives could extend the trade 

 by carrying the contents of their husbands' boats away inland, 

 in order, as in the still more primitive times, to barter the fish 

 for other produce. The fishermen of Comacchio, for instance, 

 still cure their eels, because they have not the means of send- 

 ing them so rapidly into the interior of Italy as would admit 

 of their being eaten fresh. Scotch salmon in the beginning 

 of the present century was nearly all kippered or cured as 

 soon as caught, because the demand for the fresh fish was 

 only local, and therefore limited. With the discovery that 

 salmon by being packed in ice could be kept a long time fresh, 

 the trade began to extend and the price to rise. This dis- 

 covery, which exercised a very important influence on the 

 value of our salmon-fisheries, was made by a country gentle- 

 man of Scotland, Mr. Dempster of Dunnichen, in the year 1780. 

 Steamboat and railway transit, when they became general, at 

 once converted salmon into a valuable commodity ; and such is 

 now the demand, from facility of transport, that this particu- 

 lar fish, from its great individual value, has been lately in some 

 danger of being exterminated through the greed of the fishery 



