38 SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 



hours. This instinct of rising to flies seems therefore to have 

 been infused into salmon by a beneficent Providence, if not as 

 a source of pleasure to man, at least as affording him the means 

 of capturing the fish, just as sporting dogs have been given 

 him to enable him to capture game. Angling has been 

 called a cruel amusement ; yet many philosophers have been 

 anglers. Doctor Paley was a great angler, and so was Sir H. 

 Davy. All animals are made to die, and having no foreknow- 

 ledge of death, it signifies very little whether they are killed 

 one way or another. A salmon which was hooked in the eye 

 arid escaped, leaving his eye on the hook, rose a few hours 

 afterwards, with the other eye to the fly, and was killed. 



Salmon rivers are usually classed as early rivers, and late 

 rivers ; and it seems to have puzzled Mr Kennedy and his 

 Committee exceedingly, to ascertain what occasioned a differ- 

 ence between them. In some early rivers the new fish of the 

 season begin to come on in November and December, and con- 

 tinue to do so till April, when the fishery falls off ; while, in 

 the late rivers, it is only then it commences. In the former 

 the fish begin to get foul, and heavy with spawn in August ; 

 in the latter they continue clean till the middle or end of 

 October ; so that, taking the whole together, it is quite clear 

 that, under a proper system, there might be a constant supply of 

 clean salmon at market during the whole year, the late rivers 

 ceasing to produce their fish just when the early rivers begin 

 to yield those of the new or ensuing crop ; and yet the wise 

 men of our legislature have put the whole upon the same foot- 

 ing, and have directed all the rivers to open and close at the 

 same time. 



Some of the savans of the north, who think they can account 

 for all the operations of nature, state in the Committee, the 

 reason why salmon enter some rivers at an earlier period than 

 others, to be, that their water, flowing from large lakes, is more 

 pure ; yet it is when rivers are in flood, that is, in their most 

 impure state, that salmon are keenest to enter them. Besides. 

 none enter those early rivers save their own fish, the purity of 

 the water, it seems, having no attraction for the fish of other 

 rivers. Those gentlemen might have considered, that a fish 



