SECTION V. 



SCOTTISH STATUTES. 



Ceux qui se sent fait un metier de la chicane ne peuvent avoir 1' esprit juste et 

 ^claire". ROCHEFOUCAULT. 



WE have just remarked, that the grants by the Crown of 

 salmon-fishings to the proprietors of lands situated on the 

 coasts, being made in direct violation of an acknowledged great 

 principle of the law, must necessarily be illegal ; the whole 

 salmon-fishing rights of the Crown being, in fact, exhausted 

 when the rivers were granted, so that nothing remained to the 

 Crown to give ; and the Crown could therefore give nothing, 

 except by taking away, by interception, what had been already 

 granted to the owners of the rivers, and had become their 

 vested right, as much as any landed estate in the kingdom is 

 so. But even were this not the case, still the use of fixed 

 engines in coast fisheries is prohibited in Scotland by the 

 Statutes, which in this respect have come in aid of justice. By 

 the usage of the salmon-fishery, and we believe long usage 

 alone constitutes law, when not contrary to any legal enact- 

 ments, the whole fishery was, as we have said, carried on by 

 net and coble. Now many salmon will pass the movable 

 coble-net ; even in the act of hauling it in, the fish pass on to 

 the adjacent fishery ; but if a fixed net were placed in front of 

 such fishery, it would extinguish it at once. This power of 

 extinguishing an adjacent fishery we conceive to be utterly 

 illegal in PRINCIPLE, and ought alone to be sufficient to con- 

 demn the fixed-net system in all parts ; for no system can be 

 legal which lays the property of one man at the mercy of an- 

 other. If, by the usage of the coble and net, coast fishings 



