OSSEOUS FISHES. 569 



thousand pounds per annum. The river is only a hundred and 

 twenty miles from its source to the sea, and its picturesque banks are 

 celebrated in a local ballad, which says, not very harmoniously, that 



" Dipple, Dundurcus, Dandaleith, and Dulocq, 

 Are the bonniest haugks of the run of the Spey ;" 



but there's " no standing water in the Spey !" The river drains 

 thirteen hundred miles of mountains, many of whose bases are more 

 than a thousand feet above the level of the sea. The Tweed, which 

 has been " poached " and plundered, by its proprietors using unfair 

 implements, until there was scarcely a fish in its upper waters, is 

 slowly recovering under legislative enactments, and its rental is now 

 seven thousand five hundred pounds. 



Salmon abounds in the Loire and its affluents, but is much more 

 rare in the Seine and Marne. They enter the Ehine and the Elbe, 

 and most of the great rivers of the north of Europe. In France 

 they were formerly found in the rivers of Brittany, and in the 

 Gironde. They are now very rare in these rivers. The coast of 

 Picardy is well furnished, but they are rare in Upper and Lower 

 Normandy. In Norway, especially in the district of Drontheim, the 

 salmon fishery is conducted on a large scale on the sea-shore as well 

 as in the interior waters. The Baltic is rich in salmon. Considerable 

 fisheries are carried on in the waters of the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, 

 as well as in the waters of Swedish Laponia. The takes vary every year ; 

 in 1860 being much above the average throughout Great Britain^ 

 or as in 1772, when the fish were so scarce in the Tweed, that it 

 was believed they had gone off the coast. They invariably go to 

 leeward with the wind, and have been caught a hundred miles off 

 land. Salmon are in condition at various periods of the year, 

 apparently not depending on the latitude of the rivers. Thus 

 the Tay is one of the earliest rivers, while the North and South Esk 

 are the latest, yet they debouch within a few miles of each other. 

 It is the opinion of Mr. Joseph Johnston of Montrose (whose acknow- 

 ledged fifty years' practical experience carries weight with it in all fishery 

 parliamentary committees) that the Stormontfield ponds, by artificially 

 rearing the parr, render them more helpless when they commence 

 river life on their own account. As a natural result, the death-ratio is 

 enormously increased cui bono ? especially when the parr have only 



