CULTURE OF THE SALMON. 103 



falls, in my salmon-fishing excursions. To this infallible 

 instinct* it is owing that Mr. Ashworth has restored the 

 Galway, in Ireland, to more than the fecundity of its 

 palmiest days ; that Mr. Cooper has established valuable 

 salmon fisheries on the Ballisodare and its tributaries ; that, 

 the Doohulla, a little stream ten or twelve feet in width, 

 has been made a highway for salmon which now spawn in 

 the feeders of the lake that discharge through it; that 

 there is a large increase in the numbers of salmon in Scot- 

 tish rivers ; and on this instinct, with the aid of fishways 

 and fish culture, the New England states now depend for 

 restocking their salmonless streams. If an impassable dam 

 prevent salmon from going as high as their native spawn- 

 ing-ground and no favorable place be found below, or in a 

 tributary entering below, they will desert the river for 

 some other. Thus a few stray salmon driven off by such 

 obstruction or by some natural enemy may enter some other 

 than their native stream, as they have been known to enter 

 the Delaware. Even those that went up the fishway at 

 Lowell (if there are no spawning-grounds below on the 

 Merrimack), may have been natives of some other river. 



* " The Earl of Dunmore caught on his property in the Isle of 

 Harris, in the Hebrides, some twenty or thirty salmon ; these he 

 marked and carried alive in his yacht to the opposite side of the 

 island, where they were all turned into a lake. In the course of the 

 same season in which they were transported, it was ascertained that 

 some of these very fish had come back again, all the way home, a 

 circuit of forty miles at least, through the pathless waters of the 

 great Atlantic, passing several rivers in their journey, up which 

 they might have gone had they not preferred their native stream. " 



