258 Salmon-Fishing. 



practice of murdering fish by moonshine, or at 

 other times to martyr them with the blaze of a 

 wisp and a barbed spear." The practice of leis- 

 tering is now happily illegal, and so the reader 

 is saved an account of it ; ground-bait may still 

 bring " considerable profit " when used at suitable 

 times and in suitable waters, and something will 

 be said on it by-and-by; but as modern salmon- 

 fishers set greater store by the artificial fly, I shall 

 direct attention to it first. 



The lures that are ranked under the title of 

 salmon -flies can be called so only by courtesy. 

 They have no resemblance whatever to any fly on 

 earth or in air, although Sir Humphry Davy sup- 

 posed that the salmon rises to a fly because it has 

 a distinct recollection of what it used to feed upon 

 when a parr. Trout, we are well assured, take the 

 artificial for the natural fly to which it bears some 

 likeness, and on which, as solely fresh-water fish, 

 they are accustomed to feed ; but salmon, prop- 

 erly denizens of the sea or the estuaries of rivers, 

 find their main subsistence there in the shape of 

 sand-eels, shrimps, and Crustacea of various kinds, 

 and seek the river-beds only at certain seasons 

 to spawn, and not to feed. Indeed, during the 

 months in which they inhabit the streams, they 

 live upon very little ; and, the purpose of their 

 migration effected, they return to the sea poorer in 



