366 AN ANGLER'S RAMBLES 



of a summer flood, the attacks of insects, the grub of the stone - 

 fly for instance, which is known to penetrate into the redd, and 

 make free with its contents, these are only a few of the casu- 

 alties to which this remaining portion of the deposit is exposed 

 (Vide Mr. Russel on the Salmon, p. 224). Their effect, how- 

 ever, is greatly to impair the crop which might be expected to 

 spring from ova which have been covered up in the natural way, 

 by the fish themselves. Instead of one-sixth, in fact, of the en- 

 tire deposit shed over the spawning-beds, I feel justified in assert- 

 ing that not above one-seventh actually comes to life. Of this 

 seventh (which, on an average, may be regarded as the annual 

 produce of a salmon river placed in the circumstances of 

 Tweed), and the disasters it also is exposed to, I shall speak 

 presently ; but it is to the primary wastage incurred during the 

 exudation of the ova that I would first of all draw attention. 

 Can this wastage to any extent be remedied, and how ? These 

 are questions I would certainly press upon the attention of the 

 Commissioners, special as well as general, of our salmon rivers. 

 The experiments of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Young, which paved the 

 way for those carried on on a larger scale at Stormontfield, go to 

 prove that artificial breeding, as it is called, properly conducted, 

 will carry the day over natural breeding to an extent which is 

 really astonishing. A saving, it has been shown, is effected by 

 it, even under drawbacks, of five or six hundred per cent. Judg- 

 ing from the limited scale, however, on which it has hitherto 

 been carried on at Stormontfield or elsewhere, there can be no 

 possible ground for congratulation on the score that the wealth 

 of this or that river, has, through means of it, been materially 

 added to. But the fact of the saving has been established ; and 

 the question has occurred to me over and over again, may a plan 

 not be devised, say through a further combination of the natural 

 with the semi-artificial breeding, to work out the principle of this 

 desired economy ? That the Tweed, of all rivers, invites to 



