178 CONTROVERSIES ABOUT SALMON GIIOWTH. [CHAP. v. 



and growth of the salmon. There have been controversies as 

 to the impregnation of its eggs, as to the growth of the fish 

 from the parr to the smolt stage ; also as to the kind of food 

 it eats, how long it remains in the salt water, and whether it 

 makes one or two voyages to the sea per annum. There has 

 likewise been a grilse controversy, as well as a rate-of-growth 

 quarrel. These scientific and literary combats have been 

 fought at intervals, and, to speak generally, have exhibited 

 the temper and the learning of the combatants in about equal 

 proportions. The dates of these controversies are not so 

 easily fixed as might be desired, seeing that they are either 

 scattered at intervals throughout the Transactions of learned 

 societies, buried in heavy encyclopaedias, or altogether lost in 

 the columns of newspapers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to 

 say that during the past quarter of a century there has been a 

 committee of inquiry either in the House of Lords or Commons, 

 a royal commission, a blue book, or an Act of Parliament, every 

 year on behalf of the salmon, besides numerous publications 

 by private individuals. 



Although no person now believes the assertion of the 

 Billingsgate naturalist, that salmon-eggs come to maturity in 

 a period of forty-eight hours, or that other authority who 

 told the world that as soon as the fish burst from the ovum 

 a smolt six inches long coming out of a pea ! it was con- 

 ducted to the sea by its parents, there is much of the romantic 

 in the history of this monarch of the brook, and about the 

 manner in which the varied disputed points have been solved, 

 if indeed some of these points be yet completely settled. 



I shall not again enter into the impregnation theory, hav- 

 ing said as much as was necessary about that portion of my 

 subject in a previous division of this work ; but will proceed 

 at once to give a summary of the parr controversy, and a few 

 statements about the grilse and the full-grown fish as well. 



According to the state of knowledge some five-and-thirty 



