72 LIFE AND HISTORY OF A SALMON. 



fish produced in the Isla will come up the Tay, passing 

 in its course the Erne and the Almond, and in the Isla 



"Repeats the story of her birth." 



Nay more, if produced in some of the streams falling 

 into Loch Tay, it will pass we know not how many 

 small rivers, and through the loch into the particular 

 stream for which it seeks. 



When Ovid (1. De Panto) thus mourns the exile's 

 fate, he was in truth describing salmon 



" Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos 

 Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui. " 



Knowing that a single salmon produces, it may be, 

 twenty-five thousand ova, and that, according to a very 

 moderate computation, one hundred million are annually 

 deposited in the Tay, we are apt to be surprised at the 

 complaints as to the decrease of salmon, not in this 

 country only, but also in Norway, Holland, and the 

 United States of America. But our surprise disappears 

 when informed that the salmon annually captured in 

 the Tay are as one to a thousand of the deposited ova. 

 It is scarcely within the power of human ingenuity 

 sensibly to diminish the finny tribes inhabiting the sea. 

 And yet the whale 



" Leviathan, which God of all His works 

 Created hugest that swiin the ocean stream" 



has by man's incessant pursuit been driven so far with- 

 in the regions of " thick-ribbed ice," that whale-oil, to 

 the great joy of gas companies, is annually becoming 

 dearer ; and ere long whalebone may be so costly that, 

 in answer to the question, " What's the use of whale- 

 bone?" we may never again receive from a boy in a 

 Scottish parochial school the ready reply, " Our mithers 

 put it in their breasts." 



But a fish alternately dwelling in the ocean and the 

 river is so much within the reach of human destructive- 



