136 SALMON-FISHERY OF SCOTLAND. 



interest of the com farmer is a sufficient guarantee to the 

 public, the same argument applies, with equal force, to the 

 owner of a salmon river that is, if his property were placed on 

 the same basis of legal security with other property. 



By this new act, the fishery begins on the 1st of February, 

 and ends on the 14th September, in all the rivers in Scotland. 

 We here trace the effects of the stake-net theory, by which no 

 distinction is made between the early and late rivers, because, 

 as stake-nets fish only during the summer months, the owners 

 of these engines wished to bring the whole fishery as near their 

 own fishing season as possible ; and, accordingly, the candid 

 Dr Fleming recommended that it should be carried on only 

 from the 1st of May to the 1st of August. Neither this gentle- 

 man, nor the stake-net fishers, nor Messrs Drummond and 

 Kennedy, seem to know that the winter months, as we said 

 before, are as much the regular fishing season of the early rivers 

 as the summer months are of the late rivers, and that the fish 

 are then of by far the finest and richest quality ; if Messrs 

 Drummond and Kennedy do not know this, after all the fish- 

 ing knowledge they acquired in the Committee, it is a great 

 pity to see the whole salmon-fishery of Scotland at the mercy 

 of such ignorance : if they do know it, how will they justify 

 depriving the owners of the fishery and the public of so much 

 valuable fish? For, by this Act, the owners of the early 

 rivers, which the salmon enter clean from the sea during 

 the winter, dare not touch them dare not, in a country the 

 " envy and admiration of all mankind," touch their own pro- 

 perty, until it becomes useless that is, until after the 1st of 

 February, when the fish have lain so long in the fresh water 

 as to have grown lean and discoloured, and then, our wise legis- 

 lators tell them, they may kill them and send them to market. 

 In the Tweed, and all the English and Irish rivers, this is not 

 the case ; for the new fish may be taken still in those rivers in 

 their natural season, when they first make their appearance 

 from the sea. The market is shut to Scotland alone, as if that 

 degraded country were doomed by nature to be the victim of 

 injustice, from her legislators as well as her courts of law ; we 

 say degraded, because we cannot conceive greater degradation 



