Salmon Disease. 297 



the fungus disease. It is not my purpose to enter 

 upon the vexed question of its origin, nor am I 

 prepared with any nostrum for its cure. Many and 

 divers are the causes to which it has been attributed. 

 It has been laid to the charge of pollution, of low- 

 ness of water caused by excessive land- drainage, 

 of effects of frost and snow on the water, of over- 

 stocking or overcrowding of fish, of obstruction by 

 weirs, of wounds caused by fish fighting on the 

 spawning-beds, and many more. Whether the dis- 

 ease in its origin or in its development is to be 

 attributed to any or to none of these, or whether 

 this epidemic among the fish is simply Nature's 

 method of thinning an overstocked community, are 

 questions still unsolved. The Eoyal Commission 

 of 1880 could do little more than submit a host 

 of conflicting views; the Inspectors of Fisheries, 

 though able in their most recent reports to record 

 discoveries as to the propagation of the disease 

 among various fish, are silent alike as to its cause 

 and its cure ; and science has been appealed to, but 

 as yet has declined to reply. 1 



1 The most recent contribution to this question is that con- 

 tained in the Keport of Professor Huxley, the Inspector of 

 Fisheries (1883) : "These experiments [of Mr George Murray] 

 afford conclusive proof that the saprole'gnia may attack a fish, 

 the epidermis of which is entire and uninjured. They dispose of 

 the theory that abrasions are a necessary precedent condition for 

 the development of the disease j and as they show that perfectly 



