370 FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND. 



" Most fish live either in fresh or in salt water ; 

 the salmon inhabits both. Bred in the higher 

 waters of our rivers, the young salmon of one, 

 two, or three years' growth make their way down 

 to the sea as sinolts, and return thence, impelled 

 by the instinct of reproduction, to seek the gravelly 

 spawning beds in the mountain streams. In early 

 spring and through the summer and autumn 

 months they come from the sea, bright-coated and 

 silvery, and swim and leap and struggle up the 

 rivers. Then is the fisherman's harvest. In win- 

 ter the spawning time comes on, when the laws of 

 nature and of man alike forbid their capture ; for 

 the fish, at other times so rich a luxury, are now 

 vapid and unwholesome. Lean and flabby, the 

 males with hooked beaks and scarred in fighting, 

 the spawned fish, or kelts, rush down again to the 

 sea ; whence, after a while, they return, fresh and 

 silvery, fattened to twice their former weight, and 

 reenter the rivers as fresh-river fish, the joy alike 

 of the fisherman and the epicure." 



Buckland constructed salmon ladders over the 

 weirs, that the fish might have free passage from 

 the rivers to the sea. He sent a series of models 

 of these ladders to the American Fishery Commis- 

 sioners, with five boxes of specimen oysters, and a 

 photograph of his museum, with its casts and 

 curiosities. He helped to obtain proper legislation 

 from Parliament, both as to fishes and sea-birds ; 

 indeed all living things, especially those aquatic, 

 had his sympathy and help. 



