SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 57 



Brunswick, not many years ago, found the rivers crowded Avith fish 

 to a surprising degree, but they have pursued the fishery with such 

 industry that for some time the numbers have been very consider- 

 ably diminished. There is no doubt that the same has also taken 

 place in this country, and that, by unremitting industry in fishing, 

 the number of salmon may and must be so reduced as to hurt mate- 

 rially the interest of the proprietors and of the public" 



Another writer says, 



" It cannot be doubted that the species are fast decreasing for 

 the genius and industry of man are ever on the stretch to find out 

 new modes for their destruction" 



The present state of the fishery confirms what these writers 

 wrote near thirty years ago ; yet such is the way in which 

 justice is now administered in Scotland and such the absence 

 of directing principles, that though stake-nets have been de- 

 clared ILLEGAL in the Frith of Tay, by a judgment of the 

 Court of Appeal, and though it must be evident, on the 

 plainest principles of common sense, that what is illegal in 

 one frith cannot be legal in another, it has hitherto been 

 out of the power of the owners of the rivers which discharge 

 themselves into the Inverness and Cromarty Friths to obtain 

 from the Court protection to their properties against the stake- 

 nets in those friths ; and the system of spoliation still con- 

 tinues there to as great an extent as ever. Had the Court 

 acted upon competent knowledge of the subject, the judgment 

 in the Tay case would have been the signal for clearing all 

 the estuaries in the kingdom at once of those destructive 

 engines. By dint of petty specialities, by raising up abstract 

 and insoluble questions totally irrelevant to the real subject- 

 matter of the question, by entangling it in the meshes of an 

 endless multiplicity of unnecessary or frivolous details, and, 

 worst of all, by a total ignorance of the true principles upon 

 which the question ought to be adjudicated, the administrators 

 of the law have unwittingly rendered it an instrument for not 

 discovering the truth, but, at the same time, all powerful in 

 entailing ruin upon individuals engaged in a hopeless struggle 

 to protect their rights from invasion and their property from 

 plunder. 



