102 SCOTCH SALMON AND SCOTCH LAW. 



salmon belonging to the rivers, passing by an element 

 to wjiich his lands can pretend no right, is a perfect 

 absurdity. He might as well claim, ex adverso of his 

 lands, a right to the ships which are sailing past them. 

 If the owners of the lands have any right at all, it must 

 be a legal right, opposed to the natural right of the 

 owners of the rivers/' 



Of this alleged legal right, derived by charter from 

 the Crown, our indignant author makes short work in 

 this fashion ; which, however horrifying to lawyers, 

 must make them sincerely lament the demise of Mr 

 Mackenzie, for so long as one of such a spirit was in 

 the flesh law-pleas must have been rife : 



" After the Crown has made a grant of a salmon 

 river or, what is nearly the same, the salmon-fishings 

 of a river it can be no more in the legal power of the 

 Crown to authorise conterminous proprietors of lands or 

 others to intercept the salmon proceeding to the river, 

 than to intercept the water on its progress to the mill. 

 The principle is exactly the same in both cases. We 

 defy any casuist in the Parliament House to make a 

 distinction between them. It is, therefore, clear that 

 all the grants of salmon-fishings to coast proprietors, 

 which, as we have shown, can only act by interception 

 of the fish in their way to the rivers, to the manifest 

 loss and injury of the river-fisheries, being all made in 

 direct violation of a great and acknowledged principle 

 of the law, are all necessarily, radically, and fundamen- 

 tally illegal!" 



In charity we hope that this was written on the 

 morning after the Laird of Ardross heard of the illegal (?) 

 decision of the House of Lords in the case Mackenzie 

 v. Houston. 



The blood of the Gael is evidently up; and he would' 

 think nothing of tossing in a blanket the Lord Chan- 

 cellor, wig and woolsack into the bargain. But as we 

 happen not to be in a passion, neither smarting under 

 the crushing weight of a lawyer's bill, we see that really 



