196 RAPIDITY OF SALMON GROWTH. | HAF. v. 



known if recaptured on its return. It was recaptured as a 

 grilse within less than three months of its departure (July), 

 and weighed about four pounds. Being marked once more, it 

 was again sent away to endure the dangers of the deep ; and lo ! 

 was once more taken, this time a salmon of the goodly weight 

 of ten pounds ! But there comes in here the question if it was 

 the same fish, for it is said that the smolt in some cases 

 remains a whole winter in the sea, and therefore that the fish 

 1 have been alluding to was a smolt that had never come back 

 as a grilse. I have a theory that half of the brood of smolts 

 sent to sea do remain over the winter and come back as salmon, 

 while the others come back almost immediately as grilse. It 

 is possible, however, that any particular fish may lose its river 

 for a season, and be in some other water for a time as a grilse, 

 and then finding its birth-stream come once again to its 

 " procreant cradle." The rapidity of salmon growth, however, 

 I consider to be undoubtedly proved. 



A good deal has been said in various quarters about the 

 best way of marking a young salmon so that at some future 

 stage of its life it may be easily identified. Cutting off the 

 dead fin is not thought a good plan of marking, because such 

 a mark may be accidentally imitated and so mislead those 

 interested, or it may be wilfully imitated by persons wishing 

 to mislead. Of the smolts sent away from the Stormont- 

 fiekl ponds during May 1855, 1300 were marked in a rather 

 common way viz. by cutting off the second dorsal fin and 

 twenty-two of these marked fish were taken as grilse during 

 that same summer, the first being caught on the 7th of July, 

 when it weighed three pounds. Mr. Buist, who took charge of 

 the experiments, was quite convinced that a much larger 

 number of the marked fish than twenty-two was caught, but 

 many of the fishermen, having an aversion to the system of 

 pond-breeding, took no pains to discover whether or not the 

 grilse they caught had the pond-mark, and so the chance of 



