174 FISHERIES OF THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC 



their capture. Voracious to a degree, he leaped from his own 

 aquarium into that of the young fry and made a clean sweep 

 of them, with one exception, and that one was minus a pector- 

 al fin. On my visit to Montreal a short time after, the little 

 fish, minus the fin, was shown me by Mr. Ferrier, in a globe, 

 where it was kept as a curiosity. 



"Another very curious incident occurred while I was 

 procuring salmon ova in the Jacques Cartier River in 1859. 

 My men were engaged in procuring ova, and they called out 

 to me that there was a large trout following the salmon, which 

 at my request they captured and brought on shore. I thought 

 from its bulk that it had been preying largely on the salmon 

 ova, and I immediately ripped it up with care, over a tub in 

 which there was a quantity of salmon milt. The trout had 

 swallowed from three to four hundred salmon ova, a large 

 portion of which was not at all injured, or appeared not to be. 

 These were carefully manipulated, the injured ones removed, 

 and the rest placed by me in a separate receiving box in my 

 Ovarium at Quebec. In due course of time these with others, 

 when they became young salmon, were placed in the River St. 

 Charles, where in some seasons I had taken as many as twenty 

 salmon in a week, one of them nineteen pounds weight, with 

 the fly." 



FISHERY GUARDIANS APPOINTED. 



Under the authority of the Fisheries Act (22 Viet., cap. 

 86), fifteen local agents or guardians, along the coasts of the 

 Lower St. Lawrence and Gulf were appointed in 1859, I860 

 and 1861, at salaries ranging from $40 to $100 per annum. 



Mr. Nettle, in one of his first reports as Superintendent 

 of Fisheries, urged the cancellation of the then existing 

 fishing rights in the territory known as the King's Posts, and 

 the leasing of individual fishing stations therein, and in fact 

 on the whole of the North Shore, for a term of five years, by 

 public competition and tender. 



